


It Was Never Jack's Beanstalk!

by orphan_account



Series: Fractured Fairy Tales in JohnKatLand [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: And I'm Not Apologizing, Blind Characters, Fluff, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Fractured Fairy Tale, How Quickly Do You Think This Can Go Wrong?, I Sure Am Screwing With This Fairy Tale, John Has the Worst Familiar, M/M, Magic is Real, Pale Porn, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Size Difference, Terrible Wizardry, Transformation, but really, johnkat - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:33:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 30,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What do you do if you meet a troll?  Hide.<br/>I mean, it's not like you're going to outrun them.  They're about twenty-five feet tall.<br/>John is really starting to regret this whole beanstalk shtick.  The grumpy guy who lives over his house is nothing like he expected!  He's actually super adorable.<br/>...Unfortunately, he still kind of wants to eat John.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. JOHN: Provoke Legumes

**Author's Note:**

> Am I running way too many fics already and failing at updating them? Ha ha ha ha ha THERE IS ALWAYS TIME FOR JOHNKAT. ALWAYS.  
> So yeah. Fractured fairy tale time! I have a whooole bunch of JohnKat stuff (fairy tales, comic thingy, this one story that's kind of like a retarded songfic) that I can resist no more. Because, you know what? JohnKat is awesome. And no one else is posting enough to give me a good fix.  
> Fair warning, this chapter is introductory. There is a distinct lack of Karkat. You must read on and await the adorabloodthirsty to begin in chapter two. Lemme know if it sucks, dudes!  
> For Christmas, I want to figure out how to use color text... -___-

There were a lot of uncertainties in the world, between girls and his dad’s teaching methods (and whatever sopor pie was supposed to be), but right now John was mostly just concerned with Dave eventually having to pause for breath. From the floor, Dave Strider, John’s bro and exceedingly cool friend continued to wheeze with laughter.  
  
“No, no, I’m sorry Egderp.” The other teenager flailed a hand upward at John’s shins. “What’s that you say? You’ve lost Casey for the _third_ time this week?” Back to guffawing he went. John did not tread on his friends, but if he was that sort of person, Dave’s ribs would be in jeopardy right now, oh yes they would.  
  
Rose Lalonde, strenuously ignoring the proceedings from her chair by the fire, turned a page in her book. When John looked over at her (because clearly Dave wasn’t going to do anything helpful), she did not react in any visible way. That was alright. John knew what she was thinking. He had to get Casey back before their parents got home.  
  
Well. John’s dad and Rose’s mom. They weren’t exactly married, and the kids weren’t actually related.  
  
It was complicated.  
  
Jade Harley, John’s half-sister, was at least sympathetic as she herded him out the door. “Casey’s just getting used to you,” she pointed out, as though she didn’t constantly have an enormous, reality-warping hound practically glued to her side. “Everyone has these initial humps to get over, John. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”  
  
John offered, “My familiar runs away at every opportunity and I still haven’t mastered a single wind spell.”  
  
Jade beamed at him and took his hand in hers. She smushed his fingers into a fist and bonked their knuckles. “Hardship builds character!”  
  
Becoming a wizard, John decided, sucked.

\----

He got back a little after dark, a squirming Salamander clutched under one arm, and his free hand maintaining a death grip on a burlap sack. Dave, who had artfully positioned himself to be within immediate ironic eyesight of the front door, hooted with laughter. Casey responded to this by spitting out a gob of acid—ow, darn it—and springing away into the deeper recesses of the house. At least the doors were closed. If someone had opened the windows, they could go hunting the world’s most obnoxious familiar by themselves, cool thanks.  
  
“Shut up, Dave,” John sighed, and threw himself face down in front of the fire. He had a small lake to evaporate off of his skin, and there were possibly still a few leeches clinging to unmentionable places. What _was_ this? Salamanders weren’t even supposed to like water. Casey had to be possessed or something.  
  
Dave prodded at John with his foot. John squished; Dave threw his head back and cackled without the pretense of having any advice to offer. Usually John could take comfort from his best friend and sort-of-kind-of brother, because they had mastered several complicated handshakes of friendship (and because Dave didn’t even have a familiar yet, which made John feel a little better about the total fail that was Casey), but right now all he wanted to do was defrost and feel sorry for himself until someone 1) offered him dinner or 2) commenced lecture #368 about letting a lesser demon wander through the town marketplace unsupervised.  
  
Neither seemed to be forthcoming. “Where’s Dad?” John asked, peeling his face out of the rug.  
  
“Huh? Oh yeah, they’re still doing work things. He sent Lalonde a message or something.” Dave grinned. “She got all pissy and locked herself in her room. Total shitstorm. Her mom had promised she’d teach her dead-raising spells tonight.”  
  
John shuddered slightly. He wasn’t questioning Rose’s talent. Just her… moral judgment. At least she had finished studying mirrorshift curses. John had spent quite enough time locked in the cellar, and he _still_ felt like his skin was a little blue-tinted, no matter how much she swore the spell had worn off.  
  
John feared for the future of this country, and all the people in it who aspired to be alive and not helping Rose practice advanced necromancy.  
  
He sat up (dripping everywhere, ugh _gross_ ) and gave his equally sodden sack a shake. Dave cocked his head, sending the tails of his black blindfold swaying. “What you got there?”  
  
“Just some stupid promotional sales item,” John muttered. “I got it for fishing Casey out of the civic water supply by some dude in a turban. Apparently,” and here John used gratuitous finger quotes because Dave, blind or not, could be counted on to discern the fine nuances of sarcasm given any opportunity, “It’s full of magic beans.”  
  
“Magic beans,” Dave repeated.  
  
“They’re supposed to grow faster or something,” John said, gingerly prodding the sack. It felt so full of water at the moment that the beans had probably melted into a fibrous slush. Hungry as John was, that didn’t sound exceptionally appetizing. So when Dave stuck his hands out in the universal sign of ‘gimme,’ John handed his prize over without complaint. He set about stripping and wringing his clothes out on Rose’s mom’s priceless foreign rug while Dave opened the sack and carelessly dumped water on his knees.  
  
They all had their talents. Rose was a prodigy when it came to the dark arts, Jade had some kind of unfathomable bond with nature, and Dave could sense magic from a mile away and through most mountain ranges. He could probably tell you what sort of spell you were dealing with too, and whether it was malicious in nature, and whether it actually did wear off and you were just imagining your skin being blue because you had PTSD. Of course, that was all assuming that Dave was feeling helpful.  
  
…Helpful was not really Dave’s default setting.  
  
Nevertheless, when Dave returned the sack to John and said, “Nothing there, man,” John bought it. He’d examined the beans himself. He’d zapped them with his own power a couple of times, thinking that he’d felt something—but no, if anything, the things were so persistently ordinary that they resisted magic. “Gonna give them to Harley?” Dave proposed. He paused. “No, wait, let me give them to her. I need a favor from her.”  
  
“And is that favor helping you to not die a virgin?” John asked dryly. “I don’t think so.”  
  
“I’m blind, John,” Dave informed him gravely. “It’s a serious issue for me.”  
  
“Uh-huh.”  
  
“I mean, I already know Harley’s hot. I don’t even have to ask awkward questions.”  
  
John rolled his eyes and headed for the window. “Uh-huh,” he said again.  
 ****“She totally digs me.”  
  
“Uh-huh.” This was when John threw the beans out the window.  
  
It felt good to take out his aggression on some aspect of his life over which he exercised a little bit of control. It felt good to throw those beans into the tremendous thunderstorm that had kicked up during the six mile trek with a slobbering, squealing Casey under his arm. It felt good to watch them splatter in the mud and sink into the filthy ignominy that was John’s life.  
  
Dave, tactfully, responded with, “What crawled up you and died?” And then Casey made a break for the window. 

\----

As it turned out, though, the beans really did grow that fast. Or, uh, maybe John shouldn’t have been fucking around with them and his goofy random generator spells all the way home. Because come morning (wake up, groan at ceiling, detach familiar’s teeth from nonexpendable limbs), John rolled over to find that his view of the sunrise was gone. In its place was a large leaf that appeared to be veined with something black and just sort of…  
  
Gooshy.  
  
John didn’t know the technical term, but he bet Rose would like it.  
  
When he set foot outside his bedroom, he was headed off by Jade, cross-armed and narrow-eyed. “So Dave ran off to his Bro’s house without explaining anything,” Jade declared as Casey immediately ducked behind the nature witch’s knees. John wilted somewhat under his half-sister’s gaze. He hadn’t even gotten breakfast yet. No fair.  
  
The beanstalk had grown a lot more than was reasonable for John’s magic. He gaped upwards at it while Jade glared at him. Not only had the stalk (trunk? It was kind of a trunk at this point) gotten wide enough to decimate Jade’s flower garden, but the whole leafy monstrosity _towered_ over the house. It was like a big verdant volcano, and it went up for what looked like miles, to the point where John could not see where the hell it ended. The clouds had swallowed it up.  
  
“Whoa,” John allowed, because he was sure that saying cool would get him punched. “That is, uh, not what I was expecting.”  
  
“What were you expecting?” Jade asked, tapping a foot against what had been a flagstone walkway—now it was, well, a bunch of loose flagstones displaced by roots that John would not have been able to wrap his arms around. “When you, oh, threw a bunch of _mysteriously procured magic beans out the window?_ ”  
  
John grinned hopefully at her. “Not this?”  
  
Ow. Jade punched hard.  
  
Dave was hanging out with his Bro (well, that’s what they all called him anyway. He was Dave’s teacher, periodically, when he wasn’t foisting off all responsibility on John and Rose’s respective parents), and Rose’s mom and John’s dad weren’t going to be back from their assignment anytime soon. Rose was speaking in tongues and being really cagey, but she still came out to help them. Together the three young magicians-in-training eyed the behemoth legume.  
  
“I’m just saying,” John grumbled, feeling a little defensive. Casey had been making passes at his fingers all morning and he was pretty sure Jade was siccing her on him. “I don’t think we have to cut it down. It’s pretty—“ Jade made a noise not unlike a growl “— _interesting_ , Jade, sheesh. Can’t we study it? Or at least wait for it to make a bean the size of a small city?” Rose’s eyebrow went up. “Come on, you know you want to see that too!” Pause. “Or, I dunno. Solve word hunger.”  
  
“With mutant magical flower-murdering beans,” Jade added helpfully. Casey, clutching at her leg, snarled at John.  
  
“ _Ysterib kveraah_ ,” Rose intoned.  
  
…Yeah, John had no idea what that meant.  
  
“I think what Rose is trying to say is that we don’t know what this thing is,” Jade offered. “You don’t even remember who gave these to you aside from ‘Turban Guy,’ John.”  
  
Turban Guy was a perfectly valid assessment of personhood, thank you very much. Jade was just jealous. She’d probably remember the guy by what sort of flower his butt smelled like or something.  
  
“Our parents aren’t here,” Jade pointed out. “They’re not going to be back from the capitol for days. I think that we should err on the side of caution and get rid of it.”  
  
“It’s just a bean plant,” John groaned, not looking forward to spending the next few hours clearing away uprooted vegetable matter. “What’s it going to do? Sway us to death?”  
  
A green tendril erupted gently from the soil, looped around John’s ankle, and yanked. He was deposited face-first into the ground in front of Jade’s feet. “Oh come on, that wasn’t the beanstalk,” John reported as he kicked off the greenery and spat out some grit. “Jade, you’re such a jerk.”  
  
“Don’t underestimate plants.”  
  
“ _Bwilge’ya vit dreglackglack_.”  
  
John signed. “I’ll get the pruning shears.”  
  
It was dark by the time that Dave returned to the house and three of his best friends collapsed on the lawn, gardening implements strewn around them like shrapnel. Before them rose a great obelisk of plant matter, charred and dented in places, yes, but supreme over their every attempt on its life. Dave prodded John with the toe of his boot until John groaned enough to prove that he was still alive. Then Dave experimentally drew his sword and charged at the beanstalk.  
  
He joined them on the lawn, holding his broken sword and not saying much of anything except one impressed, “Dude.”  
  
So apparently they had a giant, invincible magic beanstalk growing out of Jade’s garden. Man. It was still pretty cool and all, but John was supposed to be studying wind magic or dealing with Casey’s latest meltdown or fucking around with Dave by rearranging all the furniture. Not doing, well… serious work. Everything was way too serious right now. Rose had an undead army ringing the beanstalk and trying to chew it down or something (and the ‘or something’ was important here because John reeeaaaally didn’t want to know what they were actually doing). She’d already tried to contact their parents, but her seering orb couldn’t find them. That was worrying too. Seriousness + 28. Jade had busted out every tome in the household looking for curse banishment information while Dave wasn’t saying anything useful at all and had locked himself in his room. Seriousness + 43. John was watching the girls from the top of the stairs, feeling like this was all completely his fault. And what could he do about it? A big rousing round of nothing.  
  
Serious + fuck you, this meme was stupid anyway.  
  
Something kicked John’s back. Ow. “G’way, Casey,” he muttered, too dispirited to engage in another failed attempt at familiar taming.  
  
“Screw you, Egderp, do you see scales?” Oh. John tilted his head back and found Dave scowling down at him.  
  
“Is that an actual expression on your face?”  
  
“Come on,” Dave answered, kicking John again. “Need to talk with you. In private, okay, get your ass in gear.” With a final application of his feet, he’d successfully convinced John to get off the floor. John’s legs were totally asleep too. Nice. As he turned to follow Dave back, he caught Jade looking up at him. She was pale and looked really scared.  
  
John ducked his head and shuffled around the corner fast. Dave actually shut and locked his door behind them, which was weird. John looked around—fuck, had Dave been sharpening his (utterly batshit insane number of) swords all this time? What the heck. Dave’s face was all grim when he turned around too, and John absolutely couldn’t stand it anymore. Smiling, he urged, “Whoa, Dave, let’s not abandon all hope here. You can confess your undying love when we make it out of this nightmare, together.”  
  
Dave actually looked confused for about two seconds before he groaned. “Goddammit, no. Stop quoting those shitty plays. This is—“  
  
“SERIOUS, YES, _FINE._ ” John exhaled upwards. “SO, SO SERIOUS. I GET IT. LET’S ALL BE SERIOUS. DO I NEED TO SIT DOWN AND BE MORE SERIOUS.”  
  
“Egbert,” Dave grabbed him by the shoulders. “Stop freaking out. I need at least one person in this house to not be freaking out right now.”  
  
“I’M SO SORRY TO BE FREAKING OUT ALL OVER YOUR SERIOUSNESS.” John was totally freaking out and he refused to let Dave stop him. He was allowed to freak out at this point. His scale of Freak Out had been tipped and now there was going to be a catastrophic tsunami of hysteria, all over Dave’s polished weaponry.  
  
“There’s something at the top of that beanstalk,” Dave said, perhaps assuming that the quickest way to quell a John tsunami of catastrophic hysteria was to give him another problem to work on. See, this was why Dave and John were bros. It totally worked. John’s eyes got bigger and his volume dropped proportionally.  
  
“Huh. What kind of something?”  
  
“I don’t know what it is,” Dave continued. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. It feels…” he sort of twitched. “…Weird.”  
  
“Weird like your Bro’s puppets, or weird like ackg, it’s eating all of our faces off?” John questioned. Quantification was important. Ask anybody.  
  
“Weird like I don’t know, Egderp,” Dave said, releasing John’s shoulders. He collapsed neatly into his chair, and John flopped onto the bed automatically. “I’ve never felt anything like it before. I’ve tried to ask Bro about it, but English is in town and he’s being a massive tool.” John winced. He’d seen Dave’s Bro and Jake English interacting before. It hadn’t been pretty. Dave was so damn lucky to be blind and John didn’t care how insensitive that sounded. Alas! His familiar for some retcon!  
  
...There was no force in the universe that could make John Egbert stop quoting his shitty plays.  
  
Dave kicked lightly against John’s leg. “Don’t tell the girls. Jade is, like, all panicked out. And I don’t even want to know what Rose will do.”  
  
“Yeah,” John nodded. No question, the girls did not need to know about anything else that might be John’s fault. “So what are we going to do about it?”  
  
Dave shrugged. “I don’t know. You want to start practicing with a real weapon?”  
  
“Nope,” John replied.  
  
“Fair enough. But it might be a good idea to get prepared.”  
  
Get prepared, huh?  
  
In the end, John left them a note.

\----

Hey guys,  
  
So I know everybody’s all ahhhohmygod over this beanstalk thing, so I just wanted to let you guys know that I’ll take care of it. I’ve got a plan and oh yeah, Dave, I borrowed some of your stuff. I hope that’s cool. Jade, it would be nice of you if you’d let Casey stay in your room because I think she’ll eat all of my stuff otherwise? Rose, I hope you remember how to speak English soon and  
  
Oh crap, I forgot to say. Can nobody chop the beanstalk down until I get back? Because I’m kind of climbing it right now. Well, not exactly right now, because right now I’m writing you guys this, ha ha ha! But, like, when you wake up and stuff. I’ll be gone. So it would be really awesome if you wouldn’t chop it down until I get back.  
  
But if it starts collapsing all on its own, that’s cool. I’m going to see if it resists magic up top the way it does at the bottom. Yeah. It shouldn’t take more than a day, I mean… how tall can this thing even be? Pssh.  
  
Love you guys! Scratch Bec’s ears for me!  
  
John

\----

Satisfied with the note, he tucked it under the butter dish at the breakfast table and headed out. Strapped to his back were an assortment of Dave’s weaponry, a lot of rope, a satchel full of food, and a shit ton of ‘light as a feather, you should do more cardio’ charms he’d stolen out of Jade’s stuff. In hand John carried two sickles, which were the closest to actual climbing gear that he could get. He raised his hood to the persistent breeze, elbowed his way through a hoard of vegetarian zombies, and got ready to climb up the tallest beanstalk he’d ever seen.  
  
About two hours into John’s journey, his note had been discovered and three teenagers were crowded around it. Dave said what they were all thinking.  
  
“That idiot.”  
  
Because John Egbert was the only one who would actually have to climb that thing. The rest of them had wind magic, and could fly.  
  
Jade just dropped her face into her hands.


	2. JOHN: Smell Unpleasantly

Holy shit, this thing was HUGE.  
  
How long could it even take, he’d thought. How _long??_ Oh, the folly of his misspent youth. The egregious inaccuracies fountained forth by the ignorant mind. The confusion about metric systems.  
  
Yeah… the sun had set a while back.  
  
John had been climbing non-stop since this morning, just up and up and up. If there was an end to this thing, he had yet to see any trace of it. The sun had packed up and gone home for the evening, the stars were splattered all around him, twinkling gleefully in a blackberry-jelly sky, and John was clinging to the face of a never-ending plant. He felt incredibly stupid. The night was pitch black, and John could barely see his fingers in front of him.  
  
When Dave said there was something weird up here, John didn’t think he’d actually meant, you know, THE MOON.  
  
…Were their smuppets on the moon?  
  
Okay, so Dave probably hadn’t meant the moon. But John had entered some cloud cover hours ago—and actually, that was when the sun had set. By the time he’d punched back through the pocket of clouds and everything had been lightless and chilly. There was no telling how high John had climbed by now. Maybe he’d already passed the moon. Funnily enough, John hadn’t gotten hungry for lunch yet. Maybe there was something wrong with the flow of time up here?  
  
Whatever. Let’s get back to, holy shit, this beanstalk was made of HUGE. John wasn’t necessarily hungry, but he was extremely tired. His muscles ached all over, unused to this kind of work. He was going to have massive blisters on his hands tomorrow too, from using these sickles. And he was sweaty and horribly gross. Not even Jade would hug him right now. He smelled like a farm stall.  
  
He smelled like a farm stall and currently felt like something that had come out of the bad end of a horse. There was a strange symmetry to his life.  
  
For a while John had been distracting himself from the pain with a lot of off-key singing, but the joy had gone out of that along with the feeling in John’s toes. Resting would be nice—preferably on the ground—but he’d come way too far to turn around. Besides, now was not the moment to start wasting time. His friends were probably freaking out already! What kind of kind-of-sort-of bro would John be not to try and get back to them soon?  
  
So climbing it was. Briefly, it occurred to him, that this might be a lot easier if he could just fly, but he dismissed that as the ramblings of a fool and continued on.  
  
Henceforth, climbing was serious business and he wasn’t going to be involving himself in such ridiculousness. Climbing sucked so much. Bleh. Even the clouds felt heavy. It was all foggy—John had hit another stratum of meteorological wonderment—so he couldn’t see anything. It felt like he was in a tunnel, being pressed on from all sides by the leaves of this demon plant, and the sticky fog, and… big jabby rocks or something. Ow. Whatever that was, it sucked too. Everything sucked.  
  
“Wizards shouldn’t have to climb things,” John grumbled to himself. The beanstalk was thin enough that John had put the sickles away and was dragging himself upward by hand. “Wizards should be ushered from place to place by, ow—“ More jabby bits. His skin hurt. “—an entire fleet of—“ And now there were leaves in his way. Go away leaves. John reached up, batting them aside. “—Dragons and winged elves and back massagers—“ The leaves parted, and before John was  
  
Let’s take a break here and reflect.  
  
John had come here expecting something pretty impressive. Not much threw Dave for a loop. Maybe there was a huge smuppet-shaped bean or something.  
  
There was not, in fact, a smuppet-shaped bean. There was, however, something that could be called nothing but—  
  
“Unbelievable,” John breathed, automatically wriggling higher to get a better look. His hands steadied him against red earth packed on either side of his body. Overhead, the night sky stretched open like a book—yes, no world-shattering surprises there—but around him rose a series of jagged, rocky hills and stunted trees. Ground. Land. Solid stuff, rocks, John had just climbed up the sky, and somehow landed on the ground. His mouth hung open, his fingers burrowed into the cool earth, and a rock poked him in the kidneys.  
  
This was so. Awesome.  
  
John pushed himself the rest of the way out of the hole in the dirt, staring all slack-jawed at the landscape around him. Some of these plants were _blue_. He’d never seen trees that looked so gnarled like that! He didn’t even recognize the constellations anymore.  
  
When John looked down, staring back into the hole because what, what—what _was_ this? Was that the sky beneath his feet? Why, yes indeed. As he held the beanstalk leaves apart, John was staring straight down into spiraling gray clouds and a green column dropping down like the weirdest piece of rope ever conceived. And as soon as John looked up, he was back on solid ground. He gasped all over again.  
  
It looked pretty normal, when you considered that this was a world growing out of the sky. It had dirt and birds and stuff—John could hear something twittering. It was too dark to make much out, but wasn’t, you know, blowing his mind. That much. It was all kind of blasé, really—HOLY SHIT, THE SKY WORLD HAD GRASS.  
  
This was so far beyond a wizard-in-training’s dominion. John could light candles and fail to summon breezes. He was not equipped to deal with discovering a new world, no matter how many turkey sandwiches were stored in his knapsack. He needed to get back home right now and, uh. Notify the king. Or at least his dad.  
  
…Buuuuut what would it hurt to take a little look around first? I mean, John had discovered it. And possibly planted the means to its discovery. Didn’t that make him kind of important?  
  
(Forget important. C’mon. There was a world in the sky. What kind of self-declared explorawizard would John be if he immediately went back?  
  
(No kind of explorawizard at all, frankly. When you considered that, John’s course of action was extraordinarily clear.)  
  
“This,” John giggled to the sky above him as he let the beanstalk’s leaves flop back into place, hiding the sky below, “Is without a doubt the coolest moment of my life.” He had a celebratory snack, discovered that the sky world had mosquitoes—were they a universal constant? This was _so cool!_ —and then got moving.  
  
The sky world was mountainous under John’s feet. There were hunched red peaks everywhere, some colonized by trees, and most colonized by jagged rocks that looked like they would shred you in two if you tried to sit on them. John heard a frog croaking and nearly stepped in what looked like deer poop (but you couldn’t be sure. Were there such a thing as sky deer? It was a mystery). The air smelled a little different—like ozone and peppermint. It made John want to lick his lips a lot.  
  
The one disappointing thing was that there wasn’t anything around him that made him immediately think ‘Unexplored Sky World’. None of the plants looked quite right, but unless John cared to try to strap an entire dwarf tree to his back and climb down the beanstalk, it wouldn’t make for believable proof. And they were still plants, anyway. The rocks were a little sparklier than he was used to, the grass a little pricklier, and the water he came across smelled like rotten fish pee (best not to drink that). But he hadn’t seen anything he thought might convince Jade, Rose, and Dave of where he’d been. And obviously, that part was really important.  
  
This was when John saw the house.  
  
There was a house in the world in the sky. _Okay,_ John shrugged. _This is not the weirdest thing that has happened to me today._  
  
But a whole, roof-and-windows deal—it made John gawk because somehow he hadn’t been expecting this. The house was misshapen and bizarrely asymmetrical, but John was 10,000% sure that it would have something in it he could use to convince his friends of where he’d spent his afternoon. Upon approaching the house for an alarmingly protracted period of time and discovering that the front step was roughly as tall as he was, John concluded that yes, the house was reasonable proof.  
  
It was gigantic.  
  
Literal giants could live here.  
  
Never let it be said that John Egbert shied away from a challenge, though. He scrambled up the steps through a combination of mangrit and well-prepared persistence and avoided the thorny tangle of the welcome mat altogether. He found a knocker on the door, several yards higher than he could reach. He forewent that, and instead went with one of his pranking spells. It was excellent for waking Rose up at inopportune times in the morning, and also excellent for knocking on colossal doors.  
  
He had to alter the spell a little bit so it would produce a booming knock instead of an unholy shriek, but the end result was loud enough to make John cover his ears. And after two attempts, the door opened.  
  
“What the **holy crap** , Karkat, you’re such a—!!” The woman at the door burst out, trailing off as she stared into what appeared to be an empty doorstep. John, staring upwards, blood gone icy, let out a gasp of shock. She looked down. Her mouth curled into a grin full of sharp teeth.  
  
“ _Well,_ ” the woman said in an altogether different voice. It was like silk and sandpaper at once and unlike Jade’s almost-growls, this was real growling. “A human, on my hivestep. This is different.”  
  
John panicked. This was an understandable reaction to meeting a troll for the first time. Magic burned his palms and he lobbed it like Casey’s breakfast when his familiar was on a rampage—right at the troll’s face.  
  
The kingdom had been having quote-unquote “troll problems” for quite a long time now. Trolls weren’t exactly the most pleasant neighbors to have, after all—they were huge, with armored gray skin and teeth and claws like halberds. Every single one of them was murderously bloodthirsty, and they liked nothing better than to devour their human victims. It didn’t help matters that trolls had mastered a mysterious form of magic; one that no human had yet been able to understand or undo. It was for this reason that the kingdom had yet to do more than drive trolls out when they found them. Unpleasant neighbors though they were, the trolls had hidden their homeland in some sort of spell and as of yet, no one had been able to find Alternia to attempt to invade it.  
  
John, oh fuck, had possibly just succeeded where all others had failed. How had he managed that? He had no idea, and he also wasn’t thinking about it.  
  
He was thinking about the unconscious troll woman on the ground, who he had just hammered with a spell that wasn’t incanted so much as screamed in inarticulate terror. Had he… just killed a troll?  
  
Oh crap, he needed to get out of here _yesterday_. What did he even care if he’d killed a troll? It hadn’t even been on purpose. Nothing to brag about. Nothing to feel guilty about either. She’d been about to eat him. He knew it. He didn’t feel bad.  
  
Oh man, oh man, he really, really, reallyreallyreally didn’t want to touch her. Did trolls even have pulses?  
  
“Shiiit,” John whimpered, edging past the troll woman’s enormous feet. At least she didn’t smell like he thought trolls would—like vomit and manure or something—she smelled kind of chalky and sweet. Like candy. This whole world smelled like candy.  
  
Oh shit oh shit oh shit  
  
John sped up, because at this rate, he’d make it to the troll lady’s waist by dinnertime. He couldn’t tell if she was breathing. She was wearing a big black shirt, and it was kind of baggy. Her arms, limp where they’d fallen, really were gray as death. The skin on them was totally smooth. John skirted around her fingers and continued upwards.  
  
Oh shit oh shit oh  
  
Her mouth was open. Her teeth were everywhere. Not as in they were spread over the floor because John’s spell had drubbed the hell out of her, but in that oh god, what did any living being need with teeth that long and sharp? She looked like she had a mouth full of knives as long as John’s entire body. Shit. Damn. John wasn’t actually thinking of going near those, was he?  
  
Shitshitshitshit  
  
Holding his breath and tensed to flee, John climbed the troll woman’s cheek, shivering his way through all the wiry black hair curled around her pointed ears. Got to her mouth. Saw the fangs in all their gleaming ivory horror. Whimpered slightly. And very, very, veeeery carefully, John held out his arm, fingers outstretched and inched closer. He waited with both his eyes squeezed shut against the nightmarish sight of her teeth.  
  
A gust of hot air blew against the very tips of his fingers. Gently, from the troll woman’s lips, there came a snore.  
  
John fell off the troll.  
  
“Oh thank god,” he found himself gasping, even though that was probably an unreasonable response to finding out that there was one more living troll in the world. Whatever. John wasn’t ready to be killing things, even if they were trolls. He was a wizard in training. And he wasn’t even sure he wanted to be a battle wizard, like his dad. He’d way rather be an explorawizard and just… find things. And not have to kill them.  
  
Okay, okay. The troll lady was fine. She’d probably wake up anytime now, from whatever John had hit her with. John? He needed to be making like a bat out of hell right this insta—  
  
The floor was shaking. Oh what, now they were going to have an earthquake to top this all off? That was just so fucking perfect! How could this day get any better!  
  
Here’s how: “TEREZI!” Loud voice. Angry, growling voice. Not human, not at all human even a little bit no sir, oh my god WHY DID THIS NEED TO HAPPEN NOW.  
  
“TEREZI!” The snarling voice called again. The rumbling was getting worse—no, those were footsteps, weren’t they? There were lifeforms that could quake the earth like this on approach whyyyy—“THERE’S A HUMAN ON THE LOOSE, FUCKHEAD! STOP BEING USELESS FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE AND GET YOUR CANES!”  
  
Yeah, John was just going to go out on a limb and assume that trolls were going to prove far less concerned about whether or not they’d just killed a human than he’d been concerned about the troll lady. And did Murderface Troll #2 (did the Terezi-troll call this one Karkat?) just say he smelled John? Rude! John was—  
  
Okay, admittedly filthy from his climb. Yeah. He stunk to high heaven. He was dead meat, wasn’t he? Okay, come on, John. Gotta figure something out fast. There’s no way you can die like this; you haven’t even told Dave that you—  
  
“TEREZI, IF YOU DON’T FUCKING ANSWER—“ Shit, oh holy shit, the troll had to be right outside right this minute, crap. John. John, do something. Use your magic. Fly away!  
  
“—I WILL BURY YOU IN TWENTY FEET OF MY SOLID STEEL RAGE, SEE IF I DON’T—“  
  
But wind magic hated him and when John opened his mouth to try to just ready something defensive to blast the new troll off his feet and into unconsciousness, he accidentally found himself spitting out another prankster’s incantation. Frantically, he twisted magic out of the air and into his skin like the world was a damp washcloth. There was a roaring pop in his ears, frantic tingling all over, and a rapid _click-click-click_ from his neck to his toes. When his eyes opened up, he coughed out a cloud of smoke and was significantly taller than usual.  
  
Also, more female. And gray.  
  
He hoped to god that he looked enough like this Terezi troll to convince the Karkat troll, grabbed the unconscious troll woman by the legs, and dragged her out of the entryway. “Terezi!” The other guy was still bellowing, only his voice sounded normal now, possibly because John’s new ears were each the size of a horse. Even the troll’s incumbent footsteps sounded normal. It was like John was getting bitched out by Dave or something.  
  
Fuck, where was a good hiding spot for unconscious trolls? Was there a guest bedroom or something?  
  
“Seriously, fuck you, if this is a joke we’re going to have a long, vociferous discussion about personal responsibilities and how much I don’t give a shit that you—“  
  
A clawed hand closed over the doorjamb. John stared at it and the impressive yellow claws that looked capable of rending his house in half. The troll’s voice fell silent upon beholding the wide open front door of his troll-house.  
  
Then the voice came back, and sounded like death being run through at a jousting tournament. “ _Terezi, say something right now._ ”  
  
Closet. Closet was good.  
  
“I’m, uh, here!” John called out, and was relieved to find that his shapeshifting prank had also assimilated the troll woman’s voice. He sounded all growly and horrible too. Although, maybe he should sound a little less scared shitless; that probably wasn’t doing him any epic favors. He stuffed Terezi (still unconscious) in amongst the broom and dustpan and slammed the door, spinning around in time to face the new troll. He grinned automatically, as was his response to a vengeful Rose; how much scarier could a troll be?  
  
Answer: a whole fucking lot.  
  
The thing that rounded the corner was definitely still a troll, and no, being of equal size did not reduce John’s massive, suffocating terror at the sight of it. Like the female troll, it was drowned in an impressively large black shirt with some kind of weird clan symbol or cursed rune on it (probably Blooddeath or something like that. John did not have high expectations), and its skin was grayer than granite. Its eyes were sunken and horrible, yellow and half-luminous like Rose’s demon cat, and its teeth were… a little less exquisitely horrific than the female troll’s. Huzzah.  
  
There were horns. There were claws longer than John’s human legs. There was the sound of John hyperventilating, which he then covered by slapping a hand over his mouth and attempting to grin unassumingly around it. The new troll glowered at him, forehead wrinkling up until that face was so bloodchilling that John knew in T-minus half a millisecond, he was going to be fending off several tons of bloodthirsty monster.  
  
Instead, the new troll barked, “Terezi, what the fuck?”  
  
“Uh,” John said, because this was all that his new vocabulary consisted of.  
  
“Did you lose your glasses? And the hell are you wearing,” the troll snarled, and stomped forward too fast for John to sidle away. He swallowed a yelp as the troll grabbed a handful of his shirt—ohhhh shit, it was blue; John’s spell didn’t change clothes, he’d completely forgotten about that—and suddenly that distinctly hell-spawned face was really, really close. The troll sniffed the shirt and sprang away with an expression of—  
  
Huh. So John wasn’t entirely expecting that.  
  
“By the elder gods, that is foul!” The troll exclaimed, almost all the growling strangled out of his voice in favor of, well, gagging helplessly. He had his tongue out and the expression of disgust was… not scary.  
  
Kind of un-scary, actually. Anti-scary.  
  
He looked ridiculous, okay. Even with all the teeth.  
  
“You _smell,_ ” the troll spluttered, not looking like the demon John had inspected, and instead looking like a disgruntled cat that had just been sat on. “That smells. Burn it, immediately, no further delays. Ughhh, I’m going to be sick.” He slumped over against the wall, in fact looking like the smell of John’s sweat might make him sick.  
  
And John found himself giggling. At a troll.  
  
“Aw, come on,” he said, advancing on the troll—the Karkat troll. Weird name. “You don’t like it?” Karkat actually hissed at him, catlike and emphatically nonthreatening. John opened his arms, smirking. “I think you need a hug.”  
  
“Wha—“ the troll’s eyes got bigger. And bigger. And big—holy crap, how big did those get? **“NO,”** Karkat began to back up, hands outstretched like they could fend John off. He had those awful-looking claws, but they weren’t aimed towards John at all. He just held up dirty gray palms and not even the gray made it any less fun to shuffle closer and watch the panic.  
  
“No. Get back. I will vomit straight into your eyes, Pyrope. I will aim there and you will not like it, and…” John took another step. Karkat’s back thumped into a wall. “Oh god,” Karkat mumbled, dropping his arms. He threw himself back out the open door and nearly tripped over the welcome mat. John watched his legs frantically peddling away.  
  
That was… kind of ridiculously easy.  
  
He gave into laughter then.  
  
He’d just found _Alternia_. He was standing in the middle of a troll’s entryway, and he’d just faced down two of the worst enemies of his kingdom. Without a drop of blood, he’d locked the troll girl in the closet and sent the Karkat troll absconding like Casey did when threatened with a bath. Trolls. He’d just dealt with trolls.  
  
Did John Egbert immediately proceed to laugh helplessly at what an awesome prank this had just been?  
  
Damn skippy, he did!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally got this chapter to where I wanted it to be! Hopefully you guys find it as endearing as I did, watching John geek out over the sky world. XD I think I wrote this whole thing listening to Number 9's "Princess" in my head and I'm so happy about everything. I'm off hiatus!
> 
> Anyway, less funny than the first, but that's because I was setting-building and such. Look forward to more interactions with the cast because this story is far from over! (Also, Karkat was adorable in this chapter; I take no responsibility. Karkat's always adorable.)
> 
> Happy Valentine's everybody! <3


	3. JOHN: Examine Baby Kitten Face

After ensuring that the shapeshifting spell was locked in place—this spell usually had another two hours before it wore off—John decided to explore the house of his generous host, aka, Terezi, the scary troll lady locked in her own broom closet.  
  
What? He was the size of an asteroid right now. He couldn’t possibly climb down the beanstalk until he shrank back into regular John. And he was more determined than ever to find a souvenir. No one would believe that he’d wound up in Alternia unless he made it 200% clear.  
  
Troll houses seemed to be pretty much organized like human houses. John found giant plates in the kitchen (weird. He’d figured trolls would eat with their hands), and giant chairs in a living room, and giant books in a library that he couldn’t read because the Alternian alphabet looked like someone had dipped their fingers in ink and just started leaving handprints everywhere. He found giant troll slime pod things (the ones they slept in) and a giant troll bathtub—which made him start snickering. Just, Karkat’s face when threatened with a hug. That face. There needed to be a song about that face.  
  
This was so _weird_ , right? Trolls were actually pretty funny! What John should do is round up all the dirty laundry in the house (filthy articles were myriad; four teenagers lived there with only occasional parental supervision), bring them up here, and hide them throughout Karkat and Terezi’s house. It would be hilarious. He could bring the others and they could all hide under some leaves or something, watching the trolls panic.  
  
John eventually wandered into the slime pod room again—which was full of stuffed dragons with these really cute button eyes.  
  
Huh.  
  
Shrugging off the fact that trolls apparently got into plushies, John started pawing through the drawers looking for something travel-sized. Maybe he’d find a ring or something? So far, nada. Just a lot of black shirts.  
  
John looked up from his very boring quest and found Karkat in the doorway, bunched in on himself like a pinecone, only vastly larger and more bloodthirsty, one sleeve drawn tightly across his face like a mask. John straightened, wondering if he’d somehow been found out. But this troll wasn’t leaping at him or anything. Did trolls normally watch each other like this?  
  
“Hey?” John eventually attempted, offering a smile. Even behind the sleeve, he saw Karkat’s face twist up in another impressive grimace. It was enough to make John shiver. When he was little, John had endured nightmare after nightmare about trolls—and that face could have been delivered straight out of any flesh-rending, blood-spewing dream. No matter how funny Karkat had been before, he was a troll, wasn’t he? He was a monster.  
  
Maybe John didn’t need to be bringing his friends anywhere within a mile of this place after all.  
  
“Hey,” Karkat growled. John stiffened, ice going down his spine. That wasn’t a friendly voice.  
  
Then Karkat burst out, “Okay, Pyrope, I’m not even going to pretend I can fathom the depths of your sick fucking need to frustrate me until my horns combust and bake my think pan out my aural canals, you _disgust_ me, now will you please get in the ablution trap before I hemorrhage out all my scent nodules in pure agony?”  
  
“Uhh…” John pieced this together slowly. “So you… want me to take a bath?” Because that was a lot of words to tell someone to go get clean.  
  
“Oh good, talk like a highblood, that’s just perfect.” Abruptly, the troll’s voice switched into some dismally screeching falsetto, “Karkat, dost thou want me to hie myself into thine splendiferous bathtub? Oh verily?” While John’s eyebrows were shooting up, Karkat’s voice snapped back into a snarling grumble, “Yes Karkat fucking does, okay? If you lost your glasses, it’s your own fucking stupidity’s fault; I didn’t do anything to them. Now stop tormenting me before this degenerates into us stabbing each other in our sleep, go engage in ablutions and stop this insanity.”  
  
How was John even supposed to _respond_ to that?  
  
John laughed so hard his eyes were watering, sagging against the wall and clutching his stomach. “Oh my god, Karkat!” He’d never heard anything quite so hilariously disgruntled in his life. The best part was the delivery, because Karkat looked so incredibly fierce—and now that John was giggling at him, he’d dropped his sleeve and had this affronted look on his face that wasn’t threatening. John wanted to poke him. Karkat was turning a sort of cherry red, mouth half open, and dare John think it? It… was cute.  
  
John had to mess with this guy. Right now, he was about 60% sure that this wouldn’t end with stabbing and that Karkat would just flail and diatribe at him more. Jesus, he was pretty much the worst troll ever. And it was adorable.  
  
“Ablution trap, right,” John said, like he was thinking about it. He was in no way thinking about it. He was pretty sure that the stench of sweat was keeping Karkat from telling that he didn’t smell anything like any Terezi Pyropes. Besides, no. The prankster’s code did not let you take advantage of things like shapeshifting spells and Terezi _was_ a girl, even if it was a troll-girl. Again: _no._ “Cause I smell.”  
  
“You smell like a human crawled up a snufflebeast’s backside, died, and exploded into a thousand fecal remnants that will haunt my nightmares for the rest of this shitty eternity,” Karkat informed him, managing to be both long-winded and nonchalant. John wasn’t sure how he did it, but the ultimate effect made John have a really hard time not breaking into another giggle fit. “Congratulations. You can add that to your proud list of life achievements. I know you have so many.” He proceeded to direct John’s attention with a sweeping gesture to the bathroom down the hall. “Now go, oh palewife. For the good of Alternia, and my fucking lifespan.”  
  
“You sure curse a lot,” John observed, which made Karkat’s eyebrows snap down. It _should_ have been fearsome. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. If you just looked at his face and teeth and all that gray skin, it would have been poop-your-pants monstrous, but if you were also looking at Karkat—who, John was beginning to realize, wouldn’t have been scary at all if he stopped making faces and using the growly voice—it was cute. It was like a puppy with a bone and it made you want to scoop him up and snoggle him until he fussed more. John wasn’t sure where the impulse to snoggle a thirty-foot monster was coming from, but gosh it came strong.  
  
It prompted John to add, “As your wife, I think you should tone it down.”  
  
Karkat’s mouth fell open. “I— _what._ ” Come to think of it, Karkat and Terezi didn’t look old enough to be married. So Karkat was probably being sarcastic again—whatever. Karkat looked nervous now. John sidled closer. “Uhhh, Pyrope,” Karkat said, and if he drew himself in any tighter, he’d be a little black ball of Karkat in the hallway. His eyes darted. John seized the opportunity to skitter closer. Karkat’s nose wrinkled even as his eyes widened out of their glare. Shit, he had baby kitten face when he wasn’t glaring. Why did a troll have baby kitten face?  
  
“You’re going to hug me, aren’t you,” Karkat sighed, sounding very resigned.  
  
John burst into a huge grin and snoggled Karkat, baby kitten face at all. To his delight, this got a long, snarling grumble in the front of his shirt and a fist socked his shoulder twice. John got a bruise and the squishy-warm feeling that came with huggling something that breathed. This was the consequence to defying a troll. Squishy-warm bruising.  
  
“I hate you,” Karkat informed John, now sort of head-butting him repeatedly. This would have been more menacing if his horns had been sharp. He had nubby little horns! It was like being assaulted with the convex end of a spoon. “And no, you asshole, I’m not black flirting with you. This is totally platonic, undying hatred.” He sniffed and added in a tone of vague curiosity, “Gross. I think my nasal spheres are burning.”  
  
“Oh shit, really?” John pulled away, eyeing the troll’s nose. As soon as he saw the gray, toothy, unimpressed visage, he felt really weird. How would he even know what to do for a troll? Not to mention, why was he concerned at all? Karkat was: a troll. The enemy. The, you know, bloodthirsty… look, he was a _troll._ It did not require further explanation!  
  
(A really, really cutesyadorable troll with his hair smooshed from John’s shoulder.)  
  
But a troll nonetheless.  
  
“No, fuckass, you smell like summer sunshine and a fairy’s ass,” was Karkat’s response to John’s concern. John jumped—claws had just closed around the back of his neck—and instead of dying messily, he found himself crammed back into Karkat’s personal space. A rumbling growl erupted next to his ear. John, wisely, stayed where he was.  
  
“So now you’re hugging me because…?”  
  
The growling stopped. After a moment, Karkat huffed, “Because today has been shittier than usual, Pyrope, now do the morail thing and _give me cuddles._ ”  
  
John still didn’t know much about Terezi, but he figured that there was no way she’d be able to resist an entreaty delivered in that particularly grouchy tone of voice. So really, when he wrapped his arms around Karkat and squeezed until the troll growled at him again, it was just because he was staying in character. The growling kept going even after John stopped squishing him. But it also didn’t sound much like growling, to be honest…  
  
Which was when John ascertained that Karkat was purring at him.  
  
Well, sort of. It certainly wasn’t the wholesome sound that a mutant demon cat like Doctor Spengler produced if his ears were scratched. It was raspy and it clicked in weird places. But it was a purr, Karkat was a troll snuggled as close into John’s skin as he could get, stench and all, and John’s heart was going dangerously melty.  
“…You going to let go anytime soon?”  
  
Karkat snuffled against him. “No.”  
  
“Okay then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short-ish chapter, but one I really like~ Ah, if only I could write fluff this well at will. Yes, I do think it's well written, shut up, I can be as saccharine as I want in between inflicting psychological torture on all the innocent little boys and girls. It's cute, and anyone who says differently shall visit the majestic vista of my not giving a crap about your opinion.  
> Or, you know, taking your opinion into account as a means to improve, but still kind of being an asshat about it anyway.  
> Still have a fair number of prewrites for this left, which means updates~ I hope to actually write more for it soon, but let's face it; odds ain't good.


	4. JOHN: Oh Gog, Right in the Mouth

Karkat did not actually hug John until they both died, although it came close and John got this really weird crick in his neck from trying to twist away from Karkat’s horns. Eventually Karkat leaned away from him, still producing that clicking-purr from somewhere a little lower than his throat and sighed. He sounded like he was half-asleep, and when his eyes opened, they were glazed and warm, dessert fresh out of the oven. Then he smiled.  
  
How had John ever been even a little afraid of this guy? Reflexively, John reached up to feel his heart (narrowly avoided unwanted not-your-boob groping on the way; _real smooth, Egbert_ ) and it was beating like crazy. When Karkat smiled, his whole face rearranged. Trolls could smile, apparently, or John was dreaming this all up—but he wasn’t asleep and Karkat was really warm and the way he smiled at John, all dazed-happy and goofy made it impossible not to touch him.  
  
So John poked him, and Karkat sighed out the most contented half-purr, _ahhh_ ing sound that John had ever heard in his life, and John blushed to the tips of his ears.  
  
Karkat caught John’s hand and their fingers were all twisted together for a moment—shitshitshit, he was holding hands with a troll, he was in a girl-troll’s body, WHERE WAS THIS LEADING—and Karkat ran a claw lightly over John’s palm (was he drawing a square?) until John squeaked. This made Karkat snort and a lot of that giddy sweetness disappeared behind a sneer (that was ever so slightly curled up at the edges). “Go find your glasses, dumbass,” he mumbled without any bite in his tone. “I got food and your eyes are creeping me out to truly unmeasurable levels.”  
  
Eyes? “Oh yeah, sure,” John agreed. Troll skin, which John had felt briefly when their fingers linked, didn’t feel leathery and hard, but sort of smooth and thick, like soft wax. Karkat half-smirked at John, shoved his hands in his pockets, and sauntered off like everything was horrible and he had to stomp it out until he could abscond from all this persistent grinning. John took the opportunity to check and see what Terezi’s eyes looked like and immediately wished he hadn’t.  
  
So. She was probably blind, then.  
  
From what John had heard, Trolls were brutal. They viewed humans as weak and therefore deserving of death—and they were no kinder to members of their own species. John was probably supposed to think the usual lines like ‘saves us the trouble’ or ‘good riddance,’ but… maybe not all the trolls were bad. He wasn’t sure it was possible for Karkat to kill anything, with his kitten face and cantankerous snapping and cuddling demands. Karkat was living with a crippled troll—maybe these guys were like, pacifist trolls. Maybe if John had waited, Terezi would have…  
  
Okay, no. Looking back on their interaction, he was still pretty sure that Terezi would have stomped on him.  
  
Still, though, it was too bad. He would have kind of liked a chance to get to know them both. He might snicker at the thought of dragging a flailing Karkat into the broom closet, but John knew that he wasn’t really capable of it anymore. They had cemented their bond of stinky hugs. Shit was for keeps, man.  
  
Putting it out of his mind, John trotted back down the stairs of the troll house and navigated his way to the kitchen. He could hear Karkat banging around in there, cursing half-heartedly. Biting his lip to stop a grin, John walked in.  
  
He wasn’t really sure what he was expecting, but this wasn’t it.  
  
John had only barely gotten used to being the same size as a gray-skinned, horned monster, so when he saw Karkat completely dwarfed by what appeared to be a very large horse with tusks and _scales_ , it was with a certain degree of curiosity about whether that creature had its own planetary mass. Also, John was wondering what it was doing being propped onto the dinner table by a very determined and much smaller Karkat. Karkat was the ant in this scenario. It was him. And the scaly thing was the entire giant ass watermelon.  
  
“Fucking—stay—up—“ Karkat growled, punctuating each word with a swift kick to the—carcass? Yes, oh wow, that was a lot of blood over there. And all over the floor. Did Karkat drag this thing inside? Was it… Did it just drop dead naturally, or…?  
  
Oh, no, those were stab wounds, and those were some very bloody sickles by the wall, weren’t they. Right then.  
  
So apparently Karkat could kill things. That was, um, good to know.  
  
Karkat stopped battering the carcass for two seconds and immediately, a spool of limbs flopped off the table and into his face. “Fuck!” He announced, and John watched with a great deal of horror as cute, kitten-faced Karkat snapped off _an entire arm_ and then noticed John standing in the entryway. “Uh, Terezi!” Karkat coughed, flushing a bit. He smiled briefly, then the expression vanished behind a stony façade that involved Karkat clearing his throat a lot and brandishing the liberated limb like a spear. “Couldn’t find your glasses? I’m just finishing up in h—“  
  
The carcass somehow rolled off the table, landing with a wet sound that made John’s spine turn into something very thorny and unpleasant. Karkat spun around, swore again, and slapped the liberated flank down onto the table. “Anything else want to go wrong in front of my moirail?!” He demanded of the ceiling, sounding more or less apoplectic with rage. “No? Fan-fucking-tastic, you dipshit. All the dipshits. Fuck everything. And you, dipshit over there—“ Now he was pointing at John, with a very bloody hand that John was not entirely comfortable with. “—sit. Eat.” He pointed at the giant horsebeast leg.  
  
“Er,” said John, but Karkat wasn’t paying attention anymore. He was stalking back towards ‘food,’ muttering angrily. John watched as Karkat paused, hands on his hips, staring at the carcass like he could will it into some form of cooperation. “This seems like kind of a lot of… food,” John finally pointed out, because it did.  
  
“We’ll never get stronger if we don’t eat,” Karkat grumbled without looking. “Honestly, your blisteringly ignorant thinkpan astounds me; I don’t know how you can draw breath and operate all your spindly limbs at once. It’s a marvel which this world has offered me just so I will know the true pain off your astute fucking observations in an effort to make me cull myself. It’s a clever strategy, I will admit, but it won’t fucking work. Eat your dinner.”  
  
“Yeah, but how are we going to finish that?” John asked, mostly because he didn’t want Karkat to grab his sickles and do anything that would cause John to throw up in his kitchen, but also because he was curious. Karkat growled at him.  
  
“We don’t have to finish it! Is this really what you want to discuss when we haven’t had meat in weeks?!” He whipped around to glare, all yellow-eyed and creepy, and when John flinched back, he rolled his eyes. “What is with you, Terezi? You’re acting like a wriggler with a case of the conscience.”  
  
Oh shit. John was supposed to be acting like a troll. He’d…  
  
Wait, how had he even forgotten? He was looking at A TROLL right now! Never mind. Unimportant. Abort, and activate plan B.  
  
Thinking fast, John lobbed the bloody limb at Karkat’s face. Home it went with a splat, and then flopped lifelessly to the floor, leaving a streak of green on Karkat’s cheeks. Karkat was staring. He didn’t do anything. John was highly questioning the efficacy of plan B. “Uhm,” he said. “That, uh…”  
  
“You did not just throw your food at me, Pyrope.”  
  
John was beginning to understand that ‘Terezi’ became ‘Pyrope’ when Karkat was pissed off. Look at all this cultural exchange happening here.  
  
“I, uh—“ Fuck it, John should just attempt to work with it. “Food fight!”  
  
Karkat narrowed his eyes. “There is something really wrong with you today, isn’t there.” When John didn’t have a response, Karkat demanded. “Is it Vriska? Is this Vriska, fucking with me yet again by riding one of your infinitesimally scarce pockets of gray matter?”  
  
John didn’t know who Vriska was, but he also didn’t like the direction this conversation was going in. This was heading into ‘figure out if your troll wife is enchanted’ territory. Which could swiftly and painfully enter into ‘discover that your troll wife is a human boy and eat him’ territory.  
  
Grasping at straws, John tried to be the Terezi troll.  
  
“Vriska, uh, she’s way too stupid to think of something like this,” John tried to growl. It came out kind of shaky and scared, which wasn’t a good sign. He tried to shift towards the exit as subtly as possible. He could maybe make it out the door before Karkat came after him with those sickles. “This is just me, fucking with you for the hell of it.” Sincerity bubbled out of him before he could stop it, “It’s really fun, Karkat!”  
  
Karkat snarled at him. John shifted his weight to his heels, prepared to run before Karkat turned back to the carcass. “You are the worst moirail ever.”  
  
“I’m not your mo-moirail,” John said, only stumbling over the bizarre word a little bit. Karkat stiffened and glanced over at John fast enough that he thought he’d fucked it up, and barely managed to squeak, “I’m your pale wife, remember?”  
  
Karkat stared at him only for a moment. Then he snorted, turning back to the carcass. “Ugh, you’re such a freak. If you’re not going to eat, I will.”  
  
“Oh,” John said, stomach churning. He heard a wet _squelchshrip_ sound and Karkat had another limb in hand. Which he—oh god, right in his mouth. John did not need to see that. He looked at the ceiling, trying to banish all mental images of Karkat with chipmunk cheeks and splintered bone clutched in front of him. Holy crap, _trolls_. What was John thinking? He needed to get out of here immediately.  
  
“Don’t just stand over there like a weirdo,” Karkat said, sounding exasperated around a mouthful of ickickickdon’tthinkaboutit. “At least sit with me, gog, do I need to engrave an invitation?”  
  
…That would be nice.  
  
Uuuugh but John didn’t have a choice, or he might make Karkat suspicious. So pasting on a smile and trying not to look anywhere in particular, John shuffled over to the raw animal the troll was chewing his way through. Karkat seemed pretty comfortable on the floor, ignoring all the chairs, so John sat across from him with his legs drawn in defensively, in case Karkat tried to feed him again. Karkat didn’t seem interested, though. He continued to wolf down raw meat, and somehow, between periods of attempting to erase this situation from his memory, John saw that Karkat’s feet were sort of leaned together with his and there was a growing pile of meaty bits accumulating on the table in his direct line of sight.  
  
“Are those for me?” John asked, possibly a little too shrill. “Because that’s not necessary, ha ha. I’m not in the slightest bit hungry.”  
  
“You’ll be hungry later,” Karkat grumbled at him around a mouthful of scaly hoof. He colored suddenly, whipped the meat out of his mouth, and roared, “And I’m not saving you the good parts, Terezi! I’m just tossing whatever up there! I don’t give a shit about your weird hunger-swings; starve to death. I don’t care. Stop looking at it!” He waved an arm in front of the meat pile while John blinked—Karkat was turning steadily cherry-flavored again—and pointed sternly at the wall. “Stop looking at me. Stop smelling anything. Just direct your ganderbulbs that way and contemplate the uselessness of your existence.”  
  
“Okay,” John agreed, and stared at the wall. Karkat mumbled something about “stupid girls” and “all their baseless conclusions” and ate even more noisily than before. When John glanced over, he found that the meat pile on the table had about doubled in size and Karkat appeared to be eating while curled into a ball.  
  
For the record, the smell of raw flesh was turning John’s stomach in all sorts of new and creative ways. It was doing acrobatic flips in his abdomen, attaining orientations not possible under coherent gravity, and at all times threatening to decorate this room with his lunch. Just. Gross. Karkat was crunching his way through bones and skin and seriously, this would be about half as disgusting if he at least introduced his meal to a fire first. This was definitely a troll thing, and it was sick enough to make even the likes of Dave Strider upchuck.  
  
And John was _still_ thinking that Karkat was being adorable. Because he was. This was an objective observation of the troll saving all the choice cuts for Terezi and then refusing to admit that he was, and then getting defensive over the very perception that he might be doing something nice. As John watched (unabashedly, he was resting his head on his knees and tracking Karkat, who was too flustered to notice), Karkat was—with an expression of utmost seriousness—adding to Terezi’s pile of leftovers gently and just sort of… patting it in place, carefully.  
  
Oh man, oh man. How could anything so disgusting also be this cute?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More illicitly pale-flavored JohnKat for those readers who still find this entertaining. I hope that you are all enjoying a combination of feels and mild nausea. Have beautiful evenings, all you lovely people.  
> One more update, and then I'm out of prewrites. I'm finishing up Level Up!, and I hope to get the rough done this weekend (which you don't care about) BUT in terms of things you might in fact care about, when I'm done with it, updating this fic is next on my list, and then it's once more resuscitating the Star Trek fics and then Night Vale, although I am not greatly concerned about Night Vale at the moment, cause I've missed a bunch of episodes and as soon as I watch them I'm going to be on a Cecil high and will probably ignore everything in favor of churning out six million different oneshots and way too many updates to Fan Mail.  
> Which you also probably don't care about.  
> Dealing with authors is so much fun, right? Right.


	5. JOHN: Question Life Choices

Ultimately, John was probably supposed to be taking a life lesson from this about being thankful that the creature being messily devoured in this room was not, in fact, himself. Instead he was reflecting on how much Karkat could stuff in his mouth at once.  
  
Still, John was pretty relieved when Karkat—now significantly rounder—let out a magnificent belch and toppled backwards against the floor. This was it; he’d been slain. It had been a long and valiant fight, but at last the hero’s digestive system was forced to withdraw and surrender to the laws of physics. Karkat purred a little bit, feet twining around John’s. John shook him off and followed Karkat under the shadow of the kitchen table.  
  
What? Karkat was purring. John needed to investigate this for science.  
  
Karkat blinked upwards as John stretched out next to him.  
  
“Hey,” the troll whispered, blinking… kind of a lot. It wasn’t flirt-blinking (something John was very well versed in, thanks to being a reasonably clean teenage boy who could carry a conversation that was not about turnips), but rather the blinking of someone who had just laid a crash course for full-bellied relaxation and was not going to be conscious for much longer.  
  
“Hey,” John responded, squinting at Karkat’s face. It was streaked in gore. Did this prevent him from being endearing…? No.  
  
No, it did not, and Karkat’s hair was stuck to his cheek. John reached out to peel it off, which made Karkat’s nose wrinkle.  
  
John was quickly approaching the conclusion that he might not be able to be afraid of trolls again after this. Seriously, what did the world have left to throw at him? The next time Rose threatened him with a slow and agonizing death if he came into her room without permission, he might just burst out laughing remembering the angry Karkat troll and his fussy, bizarre ranting.  
  
Once Karkat fell asleep, it would be the perfect time to go. John would check on Terezi to make sure she was okay (she was probably really nice and endearing too, if you weren’t a human), and then put her in range of her meat pile or something. He’d make sure to close the door behind himself this time. And then he’d go back to the sky hole and wait to turn back into a human and head home.  
  
Hm. Maybe he could leave Karkat a note?  
  
Aw, man. Nope! What if Karkat read it and came after John to kill him before he turned human again?  
  
Besides, what would John say? Thanks for thinking you were hanging out with your girlfriend when she was really a human dude in disguise? Uhhh… I had fun, let’s not do this again? You’re a good cuddler, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise?  
  
Yeah, no. Weird.  
  
He probably wouldn’t miss this Karkat troll at all, once he was back on Earth. This was probably all the weird Alternian fumes. Alternia definitely had things like that! Maybe John would ask his Dad when he came home. Or no, he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t even think about Karkat! Not the snoggling or the purring (definitely not teasing him until his fangs stuck out) and there was absolutely no way John would even remember for a moment the way Karkat was blinking now, lazy with satisfaction, glowing dandelion-yellow eyes so far from scary it made John want to question… everything.  
  
Everything he’d even learned about trolls, starting with the fact that humans couldn’t be their friends.  
  
“Terezi?” Karkat had a clawed hand up against John’s face. John blinked back to reality. Karkat repeated the motion. Karkat’s hand was warm and the palm was surprisingly soft (a little slick, eww). He patted gently, thumb rubbing just at the top of John’s cheekbone, fingers cupped soft and sticky around his face, claws tickling just a bit. “You look sad,” Karkat murmured. He hesitated. “Is… this okay?”  
  
John wasn’t sure if it was okay. It was kind of weird, and unlike with a hug, he didn’t know what to do about it. It was comfortable, at least, and when the pads of Karkat’s fingers rubbed into the hinge of his jaw, his eyes shut. “Yeah,” he murmured, and let Karkat push his head against John’s shoulder. The troll continued touching the side of his face softly.  
  
“Shoosh,” the troll murmured, and John sighed heavily, kind of enjoying it even as it made him feel like Jade was sitting on his heart (her butt weighed a ton), because Karkat really was all Fear Me, I’m Adorable. And John’s spell wouldn’t last forever. “Tell me.”  
  
Somehow John doubted this command applied to admitting he was a human imposter of a troll girl who was currently (hopefully) unconscious in a broom closet.  
  
When he didn’t say anything, Karkat kept petting at his face, and his other hand ran through John’s hair. John giggled a little, feeling how much longer it was than usual—right, he didn’t exactly look like himself right now, did he?—and that trailed off into another relaxed sigh as Karkat’s claws scratched lightly over his scalp. Oh wow, that felt nice. Who knew claws could do things that weren’t that scary?  
  
Was… was Karkat drawing another square against his head? Huh. Well, it still felt nice, but what did that even mean?  
  
“Shoosh,” Karkat said again, rhythmic and compelling. John hadn’t even realized he’d stiffened up until the troll said it. “Tell me what’s wrong. You look like someone took your lachrymosick glands and filled them with acidspitter venom.” That sounded uncomfortable. “Is it your glasses? Did you actually fuck them up? We can get you something new.”  
  
John snorted. “I don’t care about the glasses, Karkat.” He subsided into a hum as Karkat ran claws along his temples. “I just…” He opened an eye (when had they closed?) to look into Karkat’s lambent gold stare. “…You ever get the feeling that you’ve just found something really cool—like a treasure or something—that’s not even possible to find? It’s not supposed to exist, but it’s suddenly right in front of your nose.”  
  
“Serendipity,” Karkat said knowledgeably. While John stared at him, wondering how he was supposed to decipher that, Karkat added, “Thought you didn’t believe in all that destiny bullshit.”  
  
“I don’t,” John said, because he didn’t (and apparently Terezi agreed with him). “I’m not talking about _destiny._ Destiny is a bunch of crapola. No one believes in destiny.”  
  
“Crapola,” Karkat repeated, looking massively unimpressed. John ignored this.  
  
“What I’m thinking about is more… Like it’s impossible and even while it’s right there in your face you’re so sure it’s _not_ possible that you keep checking under your feet and looking for possibility! But possibility doesn’t even care. Just, something amazing falls into your lap, and you didn’t even ask for it, but it’s there and it’s taking up space and you can’t just ignore it, even if it doesn’t make sense? That kind of thing.”  
  
Karkat raised an eyebrow. Slowly, he repeated, “Se-ren-di-pi-ty.” He then added, because he was Karkat and John was rapidly understanding what this meant, “You dumbass.”  
  
“Okay, fine,” John huffed. “ _Serendipity,_ whatever.” Karkat stroked his cheek—hm, was this still gay if Karkat was a troll and John was a girl and Karkat was being heterosexual for Terezi and John was just sort of being snogglesexual for a warm troll with really nice hands?—and scratched at the top of John’s head. His… horns? Because if Terezi had any, the sensation didn’t translate along John’s enchantment. He wondered what troll horns felt like.  
  
Karkat’s horns looked completely blunt. _Stop it, John. Stop thinking they’re cute. They’re horns; they are fundamentally unable to possess cuteness in any form._  
  
(They were cute.)  
  
He told Karkat, “So you’ve got this amazing serendipity thing, but you know you have to let it go, because if you hold on any longer, you’ll ruin everything. And it’s just kind of sad. Do you ever feel like that?”  
  
Karkat’s hands had stopped moving. John blinked, staring into a wobbly, crooked smile, wondering how the hell a troll—all those teeth, those horns, those eyes—could look so horribly _pained._ You didn’t think about monsters being in pain, but Karkat wasn’t a monster, and suddenly he looked like his lacry-whatevers were filled with acid things and he said, “All the time” and John had to snuggle him like the snuggle champion of all time. He reached up and found himself patting against Karkat’s cheek, because it seemed like what he should do, and Karkat shut his eyes and leaned into it, both fingers scratching along John’s scalp where his horns would be.  
  
“Shoosh,” John found himself saying, which was ridiculous and childish and silly. Karkat’s eyes fluttered open once, and he gave John a smile that was as bright as it was sad, all sunshine before a thunderstorm. Suddenly he was fumbling around, squirming—John was kind of alarmed; this squirming put a great deal more of them in contact than his heterosexuality was truly comfortable with—and then Karkat had something shiny glinting between his claws.  
  
“For you,” he said, voice slurred like dinner and a little face-patting had gotten him drunk. “Don’t start wringing your hands and expelling grieving fluids, because this doesn’t mean anything—but I got you this. Even if this is a temporary thing—“ John’s skin went a little prickly at that, before Karkat added, “—Terezi. I wanted to do something for you. You’re a good moirail. Some panmelted fuckass will be lucky to have you someday and I know you’ll shooshpap that moron until they are as perpetually bleeding from the face with your shooshpap mastery.” He added with surprising gravity, “I’ll only claim to loathe you both on principle.”  
  
So… John understood pretty much none of that last part. He was also fairly certain that if Karkat were not full, sleepy, and enchanted by the mysterious power of the face-pat cuddle, the troll would be saying exactly none of this.  
  
However, Karkat had just pressed what looked like a gold coin into John’s hand. It was shiny, pretty, and covered in Alternian scrawl. Dimly, John recognized this as a caegar, a unit of troll currency. Caegars were, in fact, made of gold.  
  
And this was, in fact, the perfect souvenir. Technically, it also wasn’t John’s. It belonged to Terezi, the good moiwhatever, and John should not be stealing from ladies. That was bad. Karkat looked like he was bracing himself to have John mess with him about it. His eyes were just slits and his mouth was all wrinkled up into a heavily fanged grimace that John would have found terrifying an hour ago.  
  
Soooo… this was definitely -100 karma points right there, but John’s hand still closed around the caegar and he grinned. “Thanks, Karkat.”  
  
“Mnuh,” Karkat replied articulately, and jammed his eyes shut. He let out a rattling snore. It sounded hilariously fake, and John kept giggling (Karkat stubbornly continued to feign sleep the whole time) until the troll’s wheezing really did even out into a doze. John maybe spent a little too much time snuggling with him even though Karkat was unconscious and the snuggling wasn’t strictly necessary. Then he got out from under the table.  
  
Trolls and humans couldn’t be friends. The coin was cold and heavy in his palm, and John kind of liked tha—  
  
Ewww, dead carcass. Dead carcass. Abscond.  
  
Abscond John Egbert did. Time to head home (his spell was beginning to itch). But first, the Terezi troll.  
  
He approaching a certain broom closet with slight trepidation. It was quiet—the troll girl must still have been knocked out?  
  
John experienced a brief surge of dismay—he hadn’t been thinking about her at all! What if his spell had done some serious damage? Was she still okay? Outright worried now, John unlocked the door and fumbled it open—oh, those were the glasses. They were pretty snazzy, actually. Red and pointy. And for that matter, Terezi was a pretty troll. John sure wondered what Karkat meant by ‘even if this is temporary.’  
  
He also wondered if it was possible to swallow his own tongue while enchanted to look like a troll.  
  
“Hello there, human,” the troll girl drawled, tilting her head. John was frozen, halfway to picking her up. This left him in the awkward position of looking like he was going for a hug with a mop, while the troll girl sat up from her sprawl against the bottom portion of the wall. “Did you enjoy your illicit stroll through my hive?”  
  
Before John could open his mouth, Terezi pushed off of the wall, teeth lunging for his throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What did we learn today, kids? That Terezi shouldn't be locked in enclosed spaces with just her rage and cunning at her disposal? This is good advice, you know.  
> So, this is not my favorite chapter. It could be written better. But whatevs, it got written. It's vaguely un-horrible. And now you're aaaaall gonna be wondering what's up until next weekend, huh? *grins* Have fun!  
> And watch Mambostuck, just on principle. Okie-dokie!


	6. JOHN: Be Repeatedly Tackled

John’s scream did not quite make it out.  
  
He’d thrown himself out of the way fast enough to avoid her teeth, and now troll girl was climbing out of the closet. TROLL GIRL WAS CLIMBING OUT OF THE CLOSET. AbortabortabORTABORT.  
  
“Please stay back?” John attempted, which made Terezi raise an eyebrow and step entirely out of the enclosed space. “Seriously, I don’t want to fight. I didn’t mean to attack you in the first place, not any more than you meant to attack me—unless you did mean to attack me, that’s a troll thing, right? Sorry. I’m sorry about the whole putting you in a closet thing too, but I didn’t have a choice…”  
  
His back hit a wall. Fuuuuck. This was not playing out very favorably. John wasn’t even sure he could call on his magic at the moment. It tended to be a little wonky when he was wearing someone else’s body, which was one of those things he really wished he’d thought about before now.  
  
“For being so sorry,” Terezi growled, “I sure was sitting in there for a loooong time, with my head splitting. Wondering gee, what’s a little human wizard doing running around in my hive?” She had canes, John realized. But she didn’t move like a blind person might. She moved like she would be stabbing the blunt end of those canes through John’s ribcage, repeatedly. One lashed out and landed on his chest hard enough to make him go ‘oof.’  
  
Terezi leaned closer to where she had John pinned, snapping her teeth again. “Wearing my face and fucking around with Karkat, no less! Why should I—“ the cane ground in, making John gasp. “Believe anything you say?”  
  
“Because Karkat is fine and your house is fine— _ouch_ ,” he broke off with a yelp as the cane drove in harder. “And because do you really think I would have knocked on your door if I knew trolls lived here? I was lost, I was curious, and I didn’t mean to intrude, but—“ Shit, his magic was crackling to life. That wasn’t good. He really had next to no control when he was under an enchantment, but if Terezi kept hurting him, it was going to fight back either way. “—but it was kind of your fault too, because you didn’t have to try to scare me or attack me or whatever right off the bat!”  
  
“I’m a troll,” Terezi said with a wide grin and no, those teeth had not stopped being utterly terrifying. Karkat’s wide, oversized teeth were a lot less menacing (though pretty damn efficient with the bones of other creatures, so John thought that his perception of this might be somewhat suspect). “It’s what we do, little human. Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of a _fucking human dumbass._ ”  
  
“Not all trolls,” John snapped. “Karkat isn’t like that, he’s nice.” _He’s adorable._ “And maybe you’re not so bad either, if you’d put the cane down and just talk to me like another pers—er, troll”  
  
Terezi’s smile vanished in a heartbeat. “Human, if you were another troll, I’d have impaled you on sight.”  
  
John winced. “Please let me leave before this gets messy?” With hope in his heart, he added, “Karkat caught a giant monster and he saved you all the really good stuff! Does that put you in a better mood?”  
  
“Not really,” Terezi said, shrugging.  
  
“Oh.” John slumped. An incantation sprang to his lips. This wasn’t going to be pretty.  
  
“—But…” Terezi pulled her cane away, smirking. “This is kind of interesting. I’ve never met a troll sympathizer.”  
  
John wrinkled his nose. “What? _No_ , no, way. I’m not. Trolls are—you guys are terrible!”  
  
“You like Karkat enough not to kill him while he was being, undoubtedly, captain of all dumbasses that ever did dumbass,” Terezi said. “That means you don’t hate trolls. Ergo, you’re a troll sympathizer.” She smiled widely. John was reconsidering his feelings towards her glasses. They made her smile look like something you’d see on a dragon. “It’s your lucky day—I happen to be a _human_ sympathizer.”  
  
“Uh-huh,” John said, not really buying it. Something about the greeting on her doorstep said otherwise.  
  
“Let’s just say you owe me a favor,” Terezi said. “Something small. You don’t seem very useful. But when I come and ask you to cash it in, I don’t want to hear any complaints.”  
  
“Sure thing,” John breathed, relieved. He didn’t mind owing Terezi a favor. He’d never be on this side of the sky again, and suddenly that felt like a pretty good thing. “One favor. Absolutely. Can I go now?”  
  
“Yeah, run along,” Terezi said, and began to head towards the kitchen where Karkat was still faintly snoring. “Oh, and human?” She leered over her shoulder at him. “A name. I’ll be needing a name to call on you with.”  
  
A bit less comfortable with this, but still fairly convinced that she couldn’t do much to him as long as he never came back to Alternia, John grudgingly offered, “John… Egbert.”  
  
Terezi sniffed the air. “Oh good,” she said. “You’re not lying.” And then she vanished around the corner.  
  
...Yeah, okay. John was still perfectly capable of being scared of trolls. Holy crap.

\----

He had a little trouble finding the hole in the sky when it was roughly the size of the tip of his pinkie finger, but he did find it. John also got a better look at Alternia from a higher vantage point. He was suddenly very, very sure that what he’d assumed were trees and mountains were actually scrub brush and clods of dirt. He could see a real forest in the distance. He wondered if that was where Karkat had hunted his meal from.  
  
Karkat. He was… The cuddling and conversations and—none of it felt quite enough?  
  
Karkat would have been a good friend, obviously. Maybe they’d even have been best friends. They would have been _awesome_ best friends. Maybe even superbestsuperlativemega friends, which was a title that John was saving for someone special, someone who was an even better best friend than his other best friends, cause sometimes he had all these great people in his corner and something just felt… missing.  
  
Friendship was a little bit hard.  
  
As John thought these difficult thoughts and felt bad that he couldn’t have clung to Karkat’s snoring, warm torso for a little longer (in a totally manly way), he heard a roaring in his ears, his body tingled violently, and his bones all went _kilk kilk kilk_ as he shrank back to a human boy named John Egbert.  
  
He promptly collapsed under the impressive weight of a gold caegar. Ow. Ow. Ow.  
  
Eventually, having successfully wrestled his way out from under the troll coin, John covered it in weight reduction spells and strapped it to his back, along with his other belongings (or, well, the ones that he hadn’t left in the troll house. Gog dammit. He’d left pretty much everything but the food there. Dave was not going to be happy with him. But Dave could suck it, because John wasn’t going back.  
  
It was going to be a long climb down. Uuuuugh—before he got too depressed, John had a totally inappropriate flashback to Karkat calling him a dumbass and snickered as he swung his legs through the tunnel, and began his descent.  
  
It wasn’t that long a climb.  
  
Interestingly, John noticed that also, after climbing for a certain while, it was daylight again. Granted, the dusky reddish daylight that came at the end of the day, right before dusk, but that actually matched the grumbles of his stomach, which was interested in dinner—without the horror that was Karkat eating uncooked, recently dead things.  
  
John took a break for a turkey sandwich. There were never too many breaks for turkey sandwiches.  
  
He made it down a little after dark, dropping on top of one of the zombies (then apologetically scrambling off of said zombie and hoping that snapped neck would heal with a little TLC from Rose). His house was still standing, which was also good. Bec was outside. John raised his hand to Jade’s familiar.  
  
Bec looked at John and gave a single, ringing bark.  
  
Uhhh?  
  
The door slammed open like a gunshot and out tore Jade, with Dave in her wake. Holy shit, collision imminent. John’s eyes got very wide and then oof, oww, his ribs could not catch a break today—he had been tackled to the ground by his half-sister, who was trying to snugglehug him to death, as though she was aware that her position as chief snugglehugger had received a dire challenge this day. Dave hovered overhead for only a moment before locating John’s head with his shoe, and then dropping down and just sort of… hugging John’s face.  
  
John flailed a little. Jade wailed into his shirt. Dave said, “No, man, accept it. Accept the floundering suffocation of our love, or suffer the consequences—by which I mean get tied up and hugged anyway.”  
  
“Umbrgh,” John said into Dave’s shirt, and gave up on flailing. He was dimly aware that Rose had joined in as well and had captured one of John’s hands to hold, which was as physically affectionate as Rose ever got. John was pretty confused about this treatment (and also pretty worried that he might suffocate from it), but he was actually allowed to breathe before this happened.  
  
Then Jade gasped, “Oh John, you’re alive! We were so worried!”  
  
“You didn’t get my note?” John asked. This got him punched. “Ow! Hey!”  
  
“We read your note, you insufferable jerk!” Jade exclaimed, eyes flashing. “Climbing that when you can’t use wind at all—what were you thinking? Do you want to plummet to your death, John?! Do you?!”  
  
“I think what Harley means to say,” Dave drawled, and let loose the noogies. Nooooo! John flailed. “Is that we flew all around that fucking beanstalk and you weren’t up there. We kind of made with the worrying—well, I didn’t, because I’m way too stoic and manly to give a shit—“  
  
“You had to wash your bandana twice because you couldn’t stop crying,” Jade pointed out.  
  
Dave shrugged and stopped abusing John’s head for a moment. “Egderp had my swords. It was tragic.”  
  
“Oh, those,” John glanced up at Dave. “Yeah, I lost those. Sorry.”  
  
“See? I was totally right to grieve. Way to fail at broship, man.” This was coupled with a punch to John’s shoulder that just… didn’t go away. Dave was, in fact, clutching his shoulder now. There was a slight tremor in his hand.  
  
So, um. Not that this was news, but John officially felt like an insufferable jerk.  
  
“We thought you fell,” Jade groaned into John’s shirt. “We thought you fell and we looked for you everywhere, but you weren’t—weren’t on the ground, and we didn’t know what to think. We called your dad and Rose’s mom, but they weren’t responding to scrying, and Rose couldn’t scry you either, and uuuugh, John Egbert, I hate you.” She sniffled into his shirt, and hugged him tighter. Without anyone saying anything, Jade burst out, “Okay, no I don’t , I could never hate you, but right now you _deserve_ it!!”  
  
“Sorry, Jade,” John said, patting his half-sister’s distraught head. “Sorry Dave. Sorry Rose, er, if you understand the English language anymore.”  
  
Rose appeared to be reading John’s palm. “ _Swvilgze, spardze._ ”  
  
Okay, then.  
  
Jade was still crying. “Shoosh,” John found himself saying as he patted her head. She grumbled at him, while Dave snorted over John’s comforting skills. Pssh, John wasn’t sorry about the swords. Dave was a jerk. “But guys,” John eventually said. “If you flew up there, didn’t you see it too? What, didn’t anybody think that I could make it that high on my own?” Jerk though he may have been, John was also feeling a little wounded that none of his friends apparently thought he was capable of actually reaching his destination without falling. Just because he couldn’t use wind magic didn’t mean he was totally useless!  
  
“Dude, Egbert,” Dave flicked his forehead. “Of course we checked the top of the beanstalk. You weren’t there.” While John frowned at him, wondering if his friends had somehow known that Alternia lived in the sky, Dave added, “For that matter, how did it take you this long to get back? The beanstalk doesn’t go that high, dude. It only goes just a little past the cloud cover and not even you can derp that much.”  
  
“Wait—what?” John blinked at him. “No, it doesn’t. Maybe there’s an illusion on it, but I climbed that thing all the way up to…” He paused. Hesitated.  
  
Was he prepared to keep a secret from his three best friends? No.  
  
But. He wasn't sure... Was it okay to tell them?  
  
John met Jade’s worried gaze and bit his lip. “Guys, uh… there’s something I need to tell you. But before I do, I want to invoke Rule of Friendship #4.”  
  
Yes, there were rules of friendship. Of course there were rules of friendship. What, your friendship doesn’t have rules? Then it quite simply doesn’t rule, too bad for you.  
  
This was the sort of thing that happened when four young people were raised together practically since birth and actually kind of liked each other for who they were as people anyway. The four siblings had several secret codes, but undoubtedly the most important were the Rules of Friendship.  
  
Rule #1: No backseat spellcasting.  
  
Rule #2: Feelings are a thing that you can talk about, as long as no one ever mentions it again. The former: this means you, Dave. The latter: Jade. Stop. Oversharing.  
  
Rule #3: You always split the last slice of cake. Always.  
  
Rule #4: If there is an official friendsecret, it must be kept until all friends involved agree on who to tell it to, when, and how.  
  
There were other rules, but these were the most important. Especially Rule #4, which had been called many times throughout their lives, although perhaps never with a secret of this magnitude. John giggled, a little hysterically.  
  
“Friendsecret,” Dave agreed first, quickly followed by Jade. “Friendsecret!”  
  
“ _Gvahhrakk,_ ” Rose growled, which was probably close enough.  
  
“I think I found Alternia,” John announced, and braced himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See? And there's plenty more. Calm your shit, readers who need shit calming. I would let you know if this was on its last legs. (No, I wouldn't. I am the lyingest liar that ever fibbed.)
> 
> Granted, the writing itself may be somewhat shit, but my interest in quality control has been heading downhill since this year started, so there you go. Blame my job going sooooo wrong.
> 
> Hehehe, so. Do you guys see all the way this is going to go awry yet?


	7. JOHN: Friendlead

After being heavily questioned about matters of sanity and caegar authenticity, the four teenagers holed up in Jade’s room (with one reptilian familiar, which was greeting John by repeatedly biting him in the leg) had agreed that John may have possibly in fact found a doorway to Alternia. Dave was key in this affair, because he reminded everyone that he’d sensed something really bizarre at the top of the beanstalk, and that the beanstalk itself was eerily hard for him to make heads or tails of. “It could be shielded,” he pointed out. “I mean, at the very least it’s got to have some sort of illusion on it, unless Egderp here randomly developed flight capabilities and then forgot about them.”  
  
“Wind magic—go!” Jade exclaimed, and threw a book at John’s head. It pegged John right between the eyes and he toppled back with a yelp. Jade slumped. “Aww. No wind magic.”  
  
“Thanks, Jade,” John said, peeling the book (which weighed about six million pounds) off of his face. “Really, I mean it. That helped.”  
  
“Bluh.”  
  
Rose was holding out another tome, tapping a section repeatedly with one of her black nails. She’d taken it upon herself to examine the caegar. So far she’d discovered that the coin was in fact solid gold (“Big as a wagon wheel, shit’s off the chain” was Dave’s contribution) and that the writing was in Alternian. The section she was pointing out was some kind of cultural study.  
  
“One gold caegar is approximately equal to five silver caegars,” John read. “Which is about fifty-three bronze caegars, which is equivalent to…?”  
  
“—A whole lot of fucking money, congratulations,” Dave filled in. “Again, this is not something that Egderp is capable of just waltzing off with because he got high in a field of sparklelilies again.”  
  
“Hey!” John exclaimed, promptly indignant. “I only did that once, and it was because you told me Liv Tyler was trapped in there!” Dave snickered, not much bolstering his case.  
  
“So, I don’t get it,” Jade groaned, hugging Bec in dismay. “John really did find a way to Alternia? Climb a beanstalk, end up in troll town?”  
  
“To be fair,” John supplied, “I wound up someplace rural. And there were only two trolls.” One of whom was Karkat, who John still sort of missed, which was weird. Usually being around his three best friends in the world made him stop missing other people (excepting his dad), but he still missed Karkat?  
  
“And they were nice to you,” Dave filled in. “Because you just shit rainbows and dreams, and everybody loves you.”  
  
“You’re welcome to stop touching my shoulder anytime, dude.”  
  
“Fuck off. Rule #3, suck it.”  
  
Point to Dave.  
  
“So, shouldn’t we… tell someone?” Jade put in tentatively, her eyebrows knitting together. “This is kind of a momentous discovery, isn’t it? If we have a gateway to the troll kingdom, we’re supposed to tell the king, right? And we’ll be able to wage war and stop them from coming through and hurting people.”  
  
John shifted uncomfortably. He was kind of not okay with that when Karkat’s house was ground zero. Dave beat him to his complaints, though. “Whoa, Harley. Never had you pegged as such a pro-war chick.”  
  
“Bluh!” Jade stuck her head in her arms. “I don’t _like_ the idea, Dave, but this is what we’re supposed to do, right?! This is what our parents are trying to stop right now! The troll infestation!”  
  
“They’re not our parents,” Dave pointed out, and wow, his voice was getting kind of sharp here. John looked up at Dave, worried. “They’re Egbert and Lalonde’s parents, not ours. Cause guess what, Harley? Our parents are _dead._ We’re _orphans._ And mine died fighting one of this kingdom’s fucking pointless wars—“  
  
“And mine got killed by trolls!” Jade shouted, raising her voice enough to make Bec growl. The menacing sound cut through the room, echoing eerily, and Jade groaned again and stuffed her face in the dog’s fur. John looked between his friends, before finally looking to Rose. She was the one who was good at this stuff. Rose was great at getting in your head and making the bad stuff not seem so bad.  
  
At the moment, she was looking at John. She couldn’t speak English, because she’d signed one of her cursed pacts with the forces of darkness again this week. Uuuugh. Great timing, Rose.  
  
“Guys?” John said tentatively. Dave was closer, but also expressionless, and remained so when John poked his arm. “Let’s not fight, okay? We’re all friends here. Best friends.” Dave exhaled, and said nothing. Jade kicked her feet a little bit. John sighed. “Um, I’m kind of voting that we don’t tell anyone about it,” he said. Jade looked up at him, betrayed, and John held up his hands. “It’s just—the trolls didn’t seem like they knew about it. It’s not like they’re going to start coming down on their own! And, um, if nobody goes up there and starts any fights, maybe no one has to die at all.” He shrugged, fiddling with the sleeves of his shirt. “Besides, the trolls I met… They didn’t seem so bad. I think they mostly just want to be left alone.”  
  
“Egderp has a cruuush,” Dave snickered. John scowled and punched him. “Was she cute, John? In all her thirty-foot, horned glory?”  
  
“Oh, screw you,” John grumbled, with maybe a little more heat than necessary. His face was heating up. Karkat was cute, just… not in any way Dave was implying. Ever. Boy-troll, end of story. And Terezi was just scary.  
  
“I don’t want to just do nothing,” Jade said, mouth set in an unhappy line. “If nothing else, when _our parents_ ,” this coupled with a sharp look at Dave, who this time didn’t correct her, “Get back, don’t you think they’re going to investigate the giant beanstalk in the middle of our lawn? If they’re going to find out about it anyway, we should come clean before they do!” Dave shifted beside John, looking uncomfortable. Clearly, he did not relish the idea of facing down two infuriated wizards of massive power either. They had many means of punishing teenagers at their disposal. Terrifying means. _Creative_ means.  
  
Rose was still looking at John, and now so were Dave and Jade. “John?” Jade said tentatively. “I mean—I guess you were the one who found it. Maybe you should decide.”  
  
“Man, I don’t know!” John exclaimed, a little put off by all this seriousness. There was emotional teardrama, and now there was friendsecret drama, and what they really needed was a couple of pranks to get their minds off of all this. John was a little too tired to set the natural order to right, though. “I guess I just want to think it over for a while? Like, maybe we could keep it a secret unless something bad happens or we decide what we should do—but just until our parents get here? And then, if we haven’t figured out anything better, we could just tell them?”  
  
“Yeah,” Jade breathed, looking relieved. Dave nodded.  
  
“Sounds good.”  
  
Rose smiled wordlessly, and prodded John’s foot with hers. _Good job_ , that prodding seemed to say. John grinned back, and smiled around the room. “I’m glad I didn’t get eaten by trolls,” he announced. Casey pounced on his leg again.  
  
It was good to be back.

\----

Of course, sitting on the decision didn’t seem to help too much. The facts remained basically the same: trolls were maybe not as bad as John had first thought. But he also knew that there were places were troll attacks were a big problem and people were dying. That wasn’t okay either—somebody definitely needed to stop that from happening!  
  
And how else could Prospit drive the trolls off without a way to fight back? A doorway to Alternia might save lives. But at the same time, John knew it could also be putting a lot of people in danger.  
  
This really was the worst possible time for John’s dad and Rose’s mom to go missing again! They were pretty much the two people in the world John thought he could trust to make the right decision about this. They also weren’t available. This was all really stressful and serious and John thought it sucked. He didn’t think there _was_ a right answer.  
  
Things had been a lot simpler just pretending to be a troll and cuddling with Karkat. Who John still missed, by the way. He knew it showed a little bit, because Dave wouldn’t shut up about John’s nonexistent troll girlfriend. This was at least partially in retaliation for John stealing Dave’s things and then leaving them in Alternia. John gave Dave the caegar to even things up—they couldn’t sell it, obviously, because that would lead to a lot of unpleasant questions—but Dave seemed pretty content to be the only person in the house whose room contained a large quantity of gold. He still gave John shit about Karkat, though.  
  
“John Egbert, a man on a mission,” Dave whispered, barely audible at the breakfast table. “Slowly, he turns and gazes into his troll-girl’s eyes. He sees their nocturnal glow, bright like the tears of her victims, and thinks shit bro, it’s so beautiful. He takes his troll-girl’s hand. He hugs his troll-girl in spite of the fact that he is the size of, like, her pinky toe. He kisses his troll-girl—“  
  
“Dave, would you shut up?!” John demanded, and lobbed his spoon at Dave’s head. Dave nimbly dodged, which wasn’t fair because he was blindfolded, the bastard. “None of that actually happened, and you’re actually making me pretty mad over here, okay!” Except all of that had happened, except the kissing part—but it had been awesome and not gay and Dave was not allowed to make it weird just because John’s disappearance had caused him to experience a feeling for once in his ironic life.  
  
Dave faced John, inscrutable and perhaps the tiniest bit apologetic. And then, “Won by his troll-girl’s charms, John Egbert is whisked, swooning, to the troll-girl’s bedroom—“  
  
John just started beating his head against the table until Jade stuck a book under his forehead and thus prevented his death. She also slapped Dave upside the head.  
  
In the end, John stumbled into Rose’s room out of a complete lack of options. He knew she couldn’t talk, but maybe she could wisely arch her eyebrows or communicate with him through pictographs. Something. He needed advice, and he needed it to come from Not Dave (who was an asshole) and Not Jade (who didn’t want to talk about the beanstalk, trolls, or anything to do with those things at all).  
  
“Rooooseee,” John groaned, flopping onto her rug. It was soft and relaxing and smelled of brimstone. This was comforting, because basically whenever John was experiencing emotional turmoil, he would talk about it on Rose’s rug until it felt better. “I need help. My head’s a mess and I don’t want to think anymore and I’m kind of worried I’m about to punch Dave, which is not a friendly thing to do.”  
  
From Rose’s bed, he heard the distinctive, familiar sound of Rose setting down her studies and picking up a notebook which John had reason to believe contained all the darkest secrets and emotional traumas of everyone in this house. “ _Vrrreglnetch_ ,” his amateur therapist encouraged.  
  
“I don’t know what to do about the trolls,” John groaned, thumping his head against the rug a few more times for emphasis. “I keep thinking about what I should do, because I’m supposed to be the friendleader this time and make a decision, but I can’t. I don’t want the trolls to hurt anybody, but I don’t want anyone to hurt the trolls either.” Why did people have to fight, anyway? Why couldn’t they just explore things or purr and cook their meat and stuff? Fighting was stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.  
  
John sighed. “But I guess… The trolls seemed nice… but I didn’t really get to know them that well? I was just pranking them. Maybe they’re not nice. Maybe they’re horrible, and I’m dooming the entire world right now, Rose, by not telling the king the way to Alternia right this fucking minute. Uuuuugh, it makes my head hurt so much.”  
  
He looked up, hoping that maybe Rose had some insights—or a cure for headaches—but she was just scribbling into her notebook. Disheartened, John continued.  
  
“And the thing is… And I know this is weird, because he’s a troll and I don’t even know him that well, but I miss Karkat.” Once more, the throes of undesired separation came swiftly upon him. John felt himself deflate. “He was weird and nice and kind of stupid, but we could have been really good friends. Unless trolls are evil, and I wasn’t paying attention?” He rubbed at his head, hopefully, but no genies of infinite wisdom came out. “It’s not like I’m not having fun with you guys,” John admitted quietly. “…It’s not like that. I just miss him.”  
  
“ _Hggehbog uvle?_ ” Rose sounded curious.  
  
“Roooooose, I don’t know what you’re saying!”  
  
Rose huffed and there was more frantic scratching in the notebook.  
  
“I don’t know why I miss him so much,” John admitted to the floor. “I guess I miss him because he was funny. And interesting. And even though he was a troll, he did all these things that weren’t scary. Plus he was super nice to me—oops, I mean, to Terezi. She’s like his troll girlfriend, I think? Anyway, they really cared about each other. I don’t think evil things can care about each other like that.”  
  
Rose was tapping her pen against the wall. When John looked up, she was presenting a page in her notebook to him.  
  
It seems to me, John Egbert, that your problems are twofold. You wish to know the true nature of trolls, and you wish to contact your acquaintance, Karkat.  
  
There is one simple solution to your concerns, however. You need only return to Alternia and visit these trolls again. Gather data sufficient to answer your question, while at the same time assuaging your need to bond with the troll Karkat.  
  
John stared. “I had no idea you could write when you’re in grimdark mode, Rose.”  
  
Rose briefly flipped the notebook around, scribbled, and then faced it towards John once more.  
  
I am a woman full of secrets.  
  
She wrote something else, but John was already sitting up, starting to grin.  
  
You know what? He liked this plan. He liked it a whole lot.  
  
Oh man, he was going to have to prank Karkat _so good._  
  
Rose’s mouth curved into a smile. She was, after all, a woman full of secrets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last April Fool's Day prank I will play.  
> Yes, yes, it saddens me too.  
> But I had fun!  
> And head's up, the next chapter might take a little while. It's gonna be from Karkat's perspective and it's being a bitch to write. It's not impossible that I'll have it done on time... But it's pretty unlikely.  
> Carry on, Johnkateers!


	8. JOHN: Sorely Tempt Fate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I said that I was going to do a bunch of Karkat's chapters next, but I realized that I have a way better point for the perspectives to switch, and I'm going to go with that one. This is totally a thoughtful creative decision ~~and not me totally failing at writing a chapter from the current stopping place okay.~~  
>  On the positive side, you guys know you loved every single scene with Casey and the kids. Don't even pretend.

“I’m going camping,” John announced casually the next morning at breakfast. Oh yes, who was the master of subtlety? Who had honed their pranking skills to a fine-tipped needle of trickster precision? The Pranking Master was willing to accept baked good donations from the faithful.

“That’s cool,” Dave said. “You’re spilling the milk.”

“What?” Oh. Crap. John resolved to set down his glass less emphatically in the future. Especially while putting forth subtle misdirections; now suddenly everybody was looking at him. Casey trotted under the table to collect the milk dripping off the edge while John stole Rose’s napkin (and got elbowed for it, argh, why did all his siblings have pointy elbows?) to scrub at the mess.

What would have been helpful right about now? Let’s see, this little evaporation spell John knew. It was simple, quick, and he inevitably set something on fire every time he tried it. What was wind magic’s problem with him anyway?

“How come you have to go camping all of a sudden?” Jade pouted at John from over her food. “You just got back! Don’t we still need to talk about what to do with the beanstalk?”

Dave snorted. “Does it _really_ count as a beanstalk when it looks like it’s trying to eat the moon?”

“Uh,” John hedged. Casey had latched onto Rose’s napkin and was quickly gulping the fabric down into the unreachable recesses of salamander intestines. Command decision time, John: do you want to strife for the napkin or save your fingers?

Fingers it is. Jade stuck her tongue out at Dave as John yanked his hand out of reach of salamander teeth. “I just, um, wanted to practice…” Casey was trying to crawl up his leg. Her teeth were snapping like applause.

Worst. Familiar. Ever.

“I knew it,” Dave said. “He’s running away to join the theater and make his coin as Background Dancer #5. Egderp, you sly minx.”

“Wow, that’s right!” John rolled his eyes. “Except I’m actually going to practice my wind magic, so no, you’re totally off the mark. And a dumbass.” He managed to pry Casey off with the edge of his chair. Dave snickered into a forkful of apple. Oh that was it.

John leaned over to poke Dave between the eyes. “Nope, no ‘Egderp is full of it.’ I’m gonna figure it out this time! Better watch out, cause when I come back, the first thing I’m gonna do is stick your bed to the ceiling and _then_ we’ll see who’s amused.”

Dave quieted. John scowled. “Dude,” the blind boy said, mouth quirking up in a grin. “Did you just get huffy with me? Good for you, bro! My little John is growing up.”

“Well, I think you can do whatever you set your mind to!” Jade exclaimed, and grinned over the table. “Good for you, John! I’ve never seen you get so serious about studying!”

The grimacing John did was totally reflexive. “…Can we not call it ‘serious’?”

“Yeah,” Dave muttered. “He’s going to look at a book for all of two seconds, fail to summon a breeze, and spend the rest of the time drawing pictures in the dirt with his practice staff.” At John’s glower, Dave shrugged a shoulder. “What can I say? I know you well.”

“Shut up, Dave,” John decided.

“Yeah, Dave, shut up!” Jade giggled, excited enough by the prospect of her brother actually studying that a wreath of equally excited butterflies bloomed around her hair. They made a spiral in midair and then promptly shot upstairs. John watched them go nervously, hoping they weren’t the excitement butterflies that ate upholstery. Again. He hated those.

When he looked back down, Jade was giving him a more solemn smile. “Just as long as you’re not going to go mess with the beanstalk by yourself,” she said.

The left side of John’s body went cold. “Er…”

“Because that would be dangerous. We don’t understand what’s up there. And one boy wizard really shouldn’t be trying to take on a whole bunch of trolls, right?”

“Right,” John said slowly. “Yeah. That would be… bad.”

Rose was looking at him again. As he glanced down he caught the edge of a curved, wicked smile. John tried to tell her with his eyes that he would really appreciate if she didn’t stare at him right now, because it was making Dave stare too, and John really wasn’t comfortable with all this gratuitous eyeballing anymore. Jade’s smile was very toothy as she added,

“But if you’re just going camping, that’s totally fine!” She munched some toast. John took a breath. “Have fun studying! Work hard! Don’t mess with any trolls!”

“…Uh-huh,” John agreed.

 ----

Okay, so the first time John had climbed the beanstalk, he’d been unprepared. Understandable. The essence of explorawizarding was not knowing what was around the bend. That didn’t mean he’d make the same mistake twice.

But should he bring his game of dice, or Propsitian chess? He just couldn’t decide, uuugh.

 ----

After wasting a lot of the morning pacing back and forth around his room (and shooing butterflies out the window), John had settled on a modest inventory for “camping,” including:

his spellbook (because misdirection was important, even if wind magic was not)

 _four_ sandwiches (in case he needed to share because maybe certain Karkat trolls decided against tunneling their way through raw meat with their teeth),

snacks,

two different games,

a toothbrush (hygiene was important, okay??)

and his sleeping roll (not that he was planning on spending the night in Alternia. Just. If it came up, you could never be too prepared!).

Overkill, ha ha ha, what are you even talking about? Sleepover--what? No. Where? John saw no sleepovers here. Just totally mature interracial diplomacy affairs of state, that was all that you'd find in the mind of this young wizard.

To that point and purpose, John also had a notebook with a series of cleverly-worded inquiries as to one’s feelings towards humanity. _Do you want to kill all humans, or just the ones who try to stab you first, yes or no? Do you regularly step on things that are significantly smaller than you, yes or no_? So that would be like five seconds, and then he could get back to having fun with his weird troll buddy.

“You seem really excited about this camping trip,” Jade had remarked while John was still flinging objects through air and generally making the most spectacular mess of his teenaged life.

“It’s camping,” John told her, attempting to fit an armful of dirty laundry into his knapsack. Stubbornly, the sack refused to instantly expand three sizes, so he began tossing shirts aside. “Camping is the most fun thing ever.”

“Okay?”

“What are you doing tonight?” John asked, and cackled as he managed to cinch his bag shut. Before Jade could answer, he exclaimed. “Not camping! Wow, Jade. You should camp more. Camping is the best.” His sister gave him a flat look. “You’re just jealous,” John informed her kindly, and went rampaging back into his closet.

Horribly human-stinky laundry for tormenting Karkat with: check.

All of Dave’s weaponry had all vanished by the time John snuck into his room. In the center of the floor, however, was one of those shitty hammers Dave’s bro had thought needed to be ironically gifted to a wizard who only used swords. It had a note attached to it. John picked it up.

Nice try, said the note, followed by an arrow. Obligingly, John flipped the note over.

You realize that if Jade finds out what you’re really doing, you are dead several times over?

Well. Yes, John did. But he’d also done much stupider things in his life that were supposed to end with a messy death, and so far his luck had held out.

Oh well, he thought as he crumpled the note into his pocket. The crappy hammer was probably a better weapon than nothing. And if nothing else, he did have his sickles.

For Rose’s part, she just patted him on the head as John flung himself out the door. _Have fun_ , that head pat said. It also added, _And don’t do anything I’m not already manipulating you into, you gullible mortal fool._

Yes, but John was her gullible mortal fool. He knew it all came from a place of love.

The boy wizard paused in the threshold of his house, whispering the words to another one of his prank spells. He grimaced his way through the sensation—like having your cheeks stretched, but all over, and opened his eyes to blink at a perfect copy of his face. Illusion Egbert beamed at him (cause this was the best plan that had ever been hatched), and took off at a sprint for the hills. Good campsites were all over the place around there! So anyone watching him leave (Jade) would be totally convinced (Jade) and not try to come after him or anything (still Jade).

As his illusion dashed out of sight, John raised a finger to his lips. “Shh,” he whispered, letting magic bleed through his tone.

Way better than invisibility. Attention deflection spells were his jam. Rose had even been watching him cast the spell, but now she was wandering away now, unable to focus on John any longer. Who needed stinking wind magic anyway when you were the Pranking Master? As John approached the beanstalk, the zombies parted for him, unaware that they were even doing so.

Yes, his spell even worked on the undead. Again: donations. And if you didn’t have any baked goods, he was alright with knitwear.

But here came the bad news. As he got closer, John caught a glimpse of white fur. Bec. Crap sandwich. Jade’s familiar was stationed in the middle of the zombies, and John didn’t think he was there for the scenic view. John could probably get around Bec with this spell, but…

Well, if Jade laid one trap, more were likely to follow. John bent down and examined the ground underfoot. Sure enough, he could sense his sister’s magic thrumming up from below. An alarm circle? Felt like one. John could tell that stepping on that would be bad—and since he couldn’t fly...

But gosh, what kind of prankster would John Egbert be if he let that stop him?

John straightened up, grinning.

\---- 

Casey was pretty easy to lure, as long as you used something she knew John didn’t want chewed on. The salamander completely ignored Bec’s warning growl, trundling after John’s practice staff like it had salamander nibbles attached to it.

When John lowered one end of the stick into tooth-range, she lunged right into the circle, and John had to stifle a giggle for about two seconds.

But that was before his familiar’s webbed foot touched down and a siren shrieked through the air like John didn’t need his eardrums. Holy _crap_ , Jade, overkill much?! John scrambled to get up the beanstalk and as far away from the UNHOLY SCREECHING RACKET as possible. He climbed as he had never climbed before, practically sprinting. Even with his sickles, John was still half-deaf by the time the alarm shut off.

He looked down to see Jade leading Casey away. The alarm circle had blazed back to life with power because Jade had no clue who was chilling out twenty feet overhead. Why? Say it with him: because John. Was. The Pranking. MASTAH.

Success tasted sweet like freshly baked cookies.

And soon all this pranking mastery would have successfully entrapped a new grumptastic friend! John was looking forward to that. With Jade out of the way, nothing could possibly go wrong!

Nothing at all.


	9. JOHN: Provide Narrative Opportunity

                John hitched his bag higher on his shoulders. It weighed about as heavy as a feather in spite of all the Highly Important Wizarding Provisions jammed in it, but the straps kept trying to tango their way off of John’s body. Real nice.

                He hadn’t taken any breaks in the climb yet and had the sweat stains to prove it. But to the bean plant, John said do your worst. He wouldn't stop until he could rest on his butt. And he still had a ways to go, heaving himself up a plant bridging between this world and the next.

                (Bridge was an altogether unacceptable word to think while climbing. This was not a bridge. Bridges were horizontal, and therefore not horrible.)

                It wasn’t very explorawizardly of him, but all John could think about was the fact that not having windy powers was complete crap. That, and how birds were lucky little twerps with their dumb wings and dumb aerodynamic tendencies. Plus they could poop on _anyone_. They could poop on the king if they wanted and nobody got to do anything about it.

                Man, being a bird would be cool, especially in instances involving distressingly tall plants. Maybe there was a spell for that?

                Correction: maybe there was a spell for that which John could think about when he wasn’t trying to climb a swaying bean plant with sweaty palms and slippery sickle handles.

                The beanstalk, horrible though it was, did have one thing in common with bridges: An end. Thank god. Twilight had closed around him a few minutes ago, even though it couldn’t have been later than midday on his world. John knew what that meant. Darkness was great. Darkness meant that his arms were almost done miserably suffering his body weight.

                It also meant it was almost time to see KARKAT, lord of the kitten-face trolls!

                John scurried higher, trying not to suck any leaves into his mouth while he grinned.

                He’d been thinking about Karkat stuff too, between examining his complex emotions regarding feathered things. He’d come up with three new pranks, and the understanding that Karkat’s life probably just wasn’t complete without someone seeing if socks could be hung from those little horns of his. John, magnanimous as he was, would bravely undertake this quest.

                Between the clustered leaves, John felt the edges of the dirt tunnel. The hole in the sky was just where he left it. His grin split wider. He grabbed handfuls of unfamiliar earth in an effort to haul himself up faster, shimmying along the slender tendril of the beanstalk until it started to bend. Flailed his hand upwards—felt the leaves shifting aside. Stone clattered under his palms. And then John was out, shaking his sweaty hair out of his eyes and peering around hopefully.

                Given that inconsistency was to magic what rainstorms were to weather, John had entertained the idea that the hole in the sky might have opened up in an entirely new, Karkat-less region, purely to make John suffer for dumb reasons, like not practicing wind magic. Pfft.

                But no, John recognized those bumpy hills. That cluster made a very convincing parallel of an upraised middle finger. This could only be Karkat’s corner of Alternia, and victory for the young explorawizard. There would be no manful weeping this day!

                John all but vibrated, squirming the rest of the way out of the bridge. Dave would love those middle finger hills. He would dedicate shitty raps to them. Man, next time! All John had to do was ask Karkat a liiiittle question, and then it would be totally cool to bring his friends around here. Humans, edible or not—? Oh, you say you would love to make human best friends? Well, Mr. Karkat, you are in so much luck this fine day! Just sit your butt down and be amazed, because you already have a human buddy and he is about to introduce you to sandwiches and basically any foodstuffs that do not bleed while you eat them.

               Without fail, this was going to go down in the chronicles of John Egbert as the best nightday EVER. The nightday of the Great Expanding Of The Circle of Best Friends to include one troll boy who John was going to be hugging until his arms fell off, and maybe his troll girlfriend. Maybe.

               Not gonna lie here, Terezi still kind of scared the crap out of John, but John was not going to judge someone he only knew from altercations involving broom closets.

               As he caught his breath and readied himself to make history, a shadow suddenly dropped over him. John blinked, but the darkness held. It wasn’t like it hadn’t already been night when John poked his head through to Alternia, but overhead, the whole sky had just gone pitch black. Was this another example of cool Alternian phenomena ripe for intrepid explorawizard discovery? John tilted his head back, staring openmouthed at the profound void overhead.

              No stars, no moon, no nothing. Just straight up black…? Wow. John thought that only Rose’s soul did that. And her fingernails.

              Oh no, wait! There were lines. Stripy looking bits. Were they getting bigger?

              Hey, you know, those were kind of familiar lines. As in, the kind that John had to hack mud clods out of before Rose would let him into the house.

                A piece of dirt clocked him as a shoe _the size of a municipal guard tower_ began to stomp downwards. John’s eyes got huge.

                “Holy shit!” John yelped, and lost his grip. His feet slipped off of the tendril he’d been balanced on and he dropped. Away, away from the big shoe. He caught himself by grabbing a stony bit of the tunnel before he could fall too far, staring up through the leaves at the descending sole.

                Oh no, was that shoe going to stomp through the sky? John wasn’t exactly an expert on the subject, but he expected that this might cause something of a mild problem for. People. Who... you know.  Lived under skies?

                Another problem might be caused by the fact that John was stuck. He’d have liked to get a little farther away from this potentially collapsing sky-tunnel. But his legs, wheeling under him, couldn’t find the beanstalk to grab onto.

               The shoe slammed down with a crash. The shockwave that rippled through the air made John flinch. Both his ears popped and leaves shivered violently— _whoa_. Jokes aside, was the sky going to hold? A torrent of rocks and dirt poured around him. John’s fingers, scrabbling for a handhold in the tunnel, were shaken loose again.

                Uh oh.

                A flash of sharply jutting fangs and wildly tangled hair was visible just around the edge of that (very muddy) shoe heel as it lifted up again.

                _Hi, Karkat_ , John thought as wind whipped past him. _Nice to see you again. Eheh. Am I about to die?_

 _Probably,_ the wind howled back. _You’re not very good at this, are you?_

                John was falling, and that was not okay. The beanstalk wasn’t even a little bit in reach. He could see flashes of it—leaves and the gnarled green stem—but his fingers didn’t reach. And the wind was _actively_ blowing John away from anything he could grab onto. It felt like a wet blanket around him, and he couldn’t swim through it to get to safety (was the wind seriously trying to kill him?). All he could see below him were clouds.

                Or at least John thought that was all he could see. He was not falling straight so much as snowballing out of control. He kept flipping over, way too fast for him to try to get his bearings. If he could just stay upright for a minute, he could—

                Ow, crap, he’d just popped himself in the eye with one of those bag straps.

                Biting back a strangled curse, John reached for his magic. He was panicking so hard that there were sparks dripping from his fingers. But he could shape it into something useful, right? Fly, come on. He needed wind spells for all of two seconds. Come on, come on, _COME_ —

                The open air only seemed to push him down faster.

                This wasn’t working even a little bit! He couldn’t hear anything over the air whipping past his ears and John couldn’t even breathe. The wind hated him! This sucked! He didn’t want to die of wind hatred!!

                But his head was going blank with panic, all the spells whipping out of it. The only thing that was left in the boy facing his death was the raw essence of exactly who John Egbert was. And John Egbert didn’t have any idea who that was at all.

                What would they call him, in that fabled and mystical chronicle of all lives, both great and small? He didn’t know, but it was already written.

                Ah yes. “The Pranking MASTER.”

                _Plan B_ , thought John frantically. _Both wizards and pranksters always need to have a plan B_. The creativity to make one up on the spot in case you were plummeting to a beanstalk-related doom was also a definite plus. John gritted his teeth and yanked a handful of feather light charms off of his bag. If he couldn’t make a spell, he’d just have to use someone else’s. That could be done, right?

                …Please let that be something that could be done!

                John gripped the charms tight in his fists, pouring his magic through them. Angry snaps of static exploded from the paper as his magic fought Jade’s. Shit. The sparks were threatening to engulf the papers entirely and light them on fire. Because clearly John didn’t have enough problems with falling from an unspeakable height; he also needed to be on fire. He closed his eyes to make himself ignore it. He couldn’t give up. He needed these spells to bend to his will.

                Needed feather light magic to stick to his own skin, even though he was pretty far from the luggage they had been made to work on.

                His bag, of course, tore away without the charms keeping it light. It went shooting down below him (John really hoped that no one was walking under there, regardless of how this turned out for him personally). Out of reach in a heartbeat, so it wasn’t like he could start concerning himself with a possible plan C from there. And John was…

                Oh no, John was still falling.

                Still falling, and completely out of ideas. No wind magic, no ability to twist another wizard’s charms, and suddenly wrapped in fog.

                He’d just hit cloud cover. He still no way to stop himself.

                This was now inching out of “pointlessly melodramatic” and into Have a Meltdown of Epic Proportions That Ends in a Not-Good Kind of Pancake Egbert.

                John’s thoughts coalesced into one whimper of denial and terror. Given that this does not make for very good storytelling, now seems like a good time to take a break from being John Egbert, the soon-to-be late Pranking Master. It is now time to be the Karkat troll.

     ----          

                However, Karkat Vantas isn’t doing anything very interesting right now. What is that, grass? Oh alright, he’s playing with herbs. There’s not a lot of narrative potential here, unless you have certain preternatural understandings about bloodgrass and its various uses. Oh well, so much for that idea. In order to keep readers entertained and engaged in this eccentric storyline, let’s forget all about John Egbert and his silly falling shenanigans AND Karkat Vantas doing whatever… disgraceful thing he’s doing with the grass.

                There’s a very nice narrative opportunity that happened two days ago, look at that. Now stop breaking the fourth wall, and read the story. Shoosh.

 ---- 

                Forty-eight hours prior to John Egbert falling through the sky in a screaming mass of terror, Karkat Vantas was staring at his temporary moirail’s back and having an assortment of complex (and unwanted) feelings.

                It wasn’t like he questioned how he’d managed to offend Terezi—there were a diverse plethora of potential reasons! His disgusting blood color, oh goody, always a popular topic of conversation. His miserable incompetence, his repeated display of cowardice when faced with anything that could not be solved by stabbing things, his forgetting to put books back on the shelves where he found them—but those were all circumstances that Terezi rightfully handled with the culling end of her canes.

                This? Karkat had not the faintest fucking clue what _this_ was.

                Karkat had a deep suspicion for things that did not immediately indicate how they planned rain suffering upon his useless carcass. When good things happened to him, it made him paranoid, and would you look at that? He’d been right, as usual. He’d gotten cuddles.

                He’d gotten ALL the cuddles, fucking cuddled like an Alternian serial killer in need of shooshes, cuddled like his was the sexiest gift to palekind. He’d been made to purr like his thinkpan was as complex as a hamster wheel (no, not even a hamster for the fucking wheel; trolls who purred about that shit didn’t _deserve_ hamsters), and Terezi hadn’t slaughtered him for proving fucked up enough to purr about physical contact he wasn’t supposed to be getting.

                Karkat had been framed. He didn’t do feelings. He especially didn’t do feelings for the troll girl who OF COURSE had gone right back to ignoring every aspect of his presence.

                Karkat snarled through his teeth, and managed to sound properly hateful. He lobbed the whetstone at Terezi’s head. She raised a hand to catch it out of the air without even turning to look at him.

                Pity. His leg joint bone nubs had not detracted from cranial integrity enough to kill him. Basically, Karkat’s head hurt. He should stop banging it into his knees. Also he wasn’t even dead.

                Karkat Vantas, Lord of the Stupids. It was a proud and honored title, handed down from grubtard to grubtard, and Karkat should feel so immensely grateful to be the latest in a long line of trolls with unrealistic expectations about their survival.

                Or in this case, about _feelings_ , which was so, so much worse.

                Not that any single one of you fuckers should confuse Karkat with a troll who had emotions. God no. His life up until this point had been a glorious parade of perfectly acceptable stability—rage. Murderous lusts. Abiding hatred. Nausea. You know, basic stuff. But then there was Terezi Pyrope and her massively pan-impaired messenger dragon, and all the sarcastic hate mail Karkat had exchanged with her in an effort to make her stop sending the dragon even vaguely southeast because it was obvious the thing was too stupid to live (or at least too stupid not to wander into the hidden valley where Karkat had remained hidden from the rest of trollkind right up until the fundamentally stupid wingbeast fell through his ceiling). And then Terezi had had her eyes stolen and…

                Karkat wasn’t pale for her, though. Karkat was a purely bloodthirsty being, just look at all the kills he had.

                But between Terezi needing _someone_ to keep her alive while she figured out how to navigate without her sight--and Karkat needing her to not have him culled now that she knew he was mutated freak spawn--moirallegance was… necessary. He’d keep her alive and in return, she’d overlook the fact that he was the most disgusting entity Alternia had ever oozed into the light. Karkat definitely hadn’t forgotten that this was a purely business arrangement _that he was not supposed to purr about_.

                He also hadn't fucking… forgetten himself and tried to hug her when he woke up. Hugs were for trolls who wanted Terezi Pyrope to remove the nuclear sludge waste from their pans with something really pointy.

                (Fuck all things, great and small.)

                When Terezi turned around and said, “Karkat, we need to talk,” Karkat had only one regret.

                It was living in this secret valley. If he’d chosen to skulk up an impenetrable mountain fortress instead, he could have thrown himself from a great height at this very moment. Falling to his unceremonious death would definitely make a better tale than this emotional nightmare, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time for a 'I broke the fourth wall and I dun care' sexy moonwalk. Hella.  
> ...If anyone hates me for this chapter, please know that you are naught but feeding the trolls, hehehe.  
> And if you guys like it, that's also helpful to know, so feel free to inform me of such tragedies.


	10. JOHN: Consider Stockholm Syndrome

So here John was, casually falling to his doom—and his big toe was itching. For the record, his toe could have had better timing, and his brain maybe could have edited out the unnecessary information given that, you know, not to beat the dead horse or anything, but. Falling. To his doom.

Maybe it was a panic thing? There was a lot of panic going on. John was coupling toe contemplation with a lot of screaming, in deference to that panic.

As John shot (screaming) down another couple of feet, the feather light charms flared with the foggy blue color of his magic. A sharp heat went up his palms as the spell stepped into his skin and abruptly John’s cloak stopped tangling around his legs to whip out around him curiously slowly. John had the sense to grab the corners and spread it out to try to catch the air. He spun, careening—and then hit his descent at the right angle.

Oof. Well, that knocked all the air out of his lungs.

But between his reduced weight and the volume of air captured inside the fabric, John’s descent slowed so much he felt like he wasn’t moving at all. He panted, and no longer thought of his toes.

_I’m alive_ , John thought. And then: _I am sandwichless_.

John’s bag was a tiny dot falling through the clouds. He watched it go sadly. So much for preparations. He willed that, at the very least, the souls of those sandwiches were able to be with their loved ones. Brave little soldier-sandwiches, go forth.

Oh right. Get back to the beanstalk before the wind whisks you off to that doom thing.

Through patience and sheer desperation, John managed to sort of row himself back towards the plant. His arms and legs wrapped around the beanstalk and John familiarized himself with the desire to never, ever let go. He was still going to be an explorawizard, just like Jake English.

Except NO MORE FALLING. That was stricken from the list of explorawizarding hijinks. It was no longer permissible, and John was not above giving his destiny a stern talking to on the subject.

He hung onto solid flora, enjoying the fact that he could breathe, and was not going to be a mess stain in the middle of Jade’s garden. Er, until Jade found his gear as a messy stain in her garden. Crap.

But whatever. He’d made his bed and he’d lay in it—first, though, Karkat.

He was not crazy. Just because John was smiling about this right after a harrowing brush with death, it did not make him crazy. It did make him real explorawizard material, though, and John tackled the beanstalk with renewed enthusiasm. He had to jab his way through a dense film of rocks and mud packed over the hole in the sky, but then he was flinging himself onto Alternian soil. Footsteps were continuing to shake the earth and he could see Karkat just a little ways away, unreasonably huge and looking…

Well, stone-cold terrifying, actually. When his eyes glowed and they were each the size of an elm tree, the effect was a little less kittenish and a little more like This Featured in Your Nightmares Heavily Growing Up. The troll was making this sound like rocks grinding together, almost as loud as Jade’s proximity alarm. All of a sudden, John remembered every scary face Karkat had made and couldn’t recall why they weren’t scary. His palms sweated. Could you get Stockholm Syndrome from cuddling?

No, come on. Where was his mangrit? He had not climbed for two hours, nearly fallen to his death, and packed dirty laundry in vain just to go skittering back down the hole in the sky like a doofus. He was here to investigate.

It was at this point that it occurred to our young hero that while his transformation spell was superlatively badass, it _did_ kind of need a troll to base itself off of. He did not see Terezi conveniently nearby.

This could be problematic. He couldn’t exactly go up to Karkat looking like a human when he asked if they could be human bros.

Time to get creative. John wasn’t as familiar with what Terezi looked like as he was with Jade (who he transformed into to get pastry discounts at the market) but he could make the transformation look pretty similar. And then all he’d have to do was hit Karkat with a thinksee spell. Really simple. Karkat would see who he was expecting to see, as long as John looked close enough to the real thing. He’d fill in all the details in his own troll brain.

…Provided this spell even _worked_ on troll brains.

But, you know. It probably DID! So John wasn’t going to worry about that.

John chanted the incantation, focusing as hard as he could on the Terezi troll. The scary red glasses, all those teeth (those horrible teeth, eep), the wiry hair, the horns. And gray skin! And big—he’d stood a good bit taller than Karkat when they’d hugged. She’d been wearing those course black clothes. Her face was pointed and slender—

And there we go. John’s spine went _pop-pop-pop_ as he stretched several yards taller, tingling all over. The world blurred before his newly enormous eyes. _Click-crack_ from his fingers, as yellow claws snapped out of them. New, long teeth pushed against his lips like he’d stuck half an orange in there to torment Jade with. In the distance, Karkat was whirling around.

And here was John, still half-human and limbs flopping all over the place as they tried to resize themselves. He should probably not be around Karkat until he was done—um. Hm.

Yeah, so, trying to walk right now had just dumped him on his face. The earth shook as Karkat shot closer, at a rate that was completely… terrifying.

Karkat’s face was a mask of nothing but teeth and bad intentions. Double crap. John coughed out a mouthful of dirt and hissed his spell, hoping desperately that his magic was up to running two enchantments at once. Light zipped out of his fingers. Karkat stumbled in mid-dash, hands flying up to clutch at his head. That break was long enough for John’s spell to finish working.

After a moment longer, it was possible for John to heave himself upright. The hands he used to do this were gray. Good start. He didn’t feel like he was growing anymore either. John tried to open his mouth to test out his new voice, but snapped it closed in a hurry. His teeth were three times as long and completely weird. John’s usual copycat spell tended to leave him feeling like he was in his normal body.

This spell left him feeling like a troll. It was pretty disturbing. John wasn’t sure anyone ever wanted to feel like trolls. Least of all the actual trolls.

Karkat straightened up too. John realized with a rapid rush of giggles that Karkat didn’t look scary anymore. Partially, because the only thing he was glaring at was a rock, and partially because that glare wasn’t _Thirsting For Blood_ , but rather _Questioning Mightily Why There Are Suddenly Three of You_. Mostly, it was because when John was troll-sized, Karkat looked like the guy John had been cuddling with. As in, John kind of wanted to tackle him to the ground and hug him until he screamed protests again.

In a minute. John’s legs still felt vaguely like pudding.

“Te…rezi?” Karkat was blinking at him now and John couldn’t help but grin. Oh yes. How many times did he have to say it? He was simply the pranking master. Looked like the thinksee spell was working fine. Karkat grimaced, rubbing an eye with the back of his fist. “Well, apparently I am all manner of fucked up this evening. Didn’t recognize you. Or I would have come at you with both sickles instead of one, and a really big shovel for whacking your corpse with.”

“Wow, that’s a really not nice thing to say!” John exclaimed, wincing slightly at the troll voice that came out of his mouth. “When I see you, I don’t want to come at you with anything.” Except his arms, especially because Karkat suddenly looked like he needed a cuddle. Why wasn’t he meeting John’s eyes?

Karkat turned his back abruptly. “Yeah, whatever, Pyrope. I thought we already went over this. You patrol your half of the territory, I’ll patrol mine, and nobody gets stabbed in the face—especially not me and my big fat mouth, because there’s no chance that I deserve to be silenced forever and prevented from spreading further nauseating idiocy.”

John was loosely translating this one to, ‘go away, I want to sulk.’

Did Karkat and his troll girlfriend have a fight? John scrambled to his feet as Karkat stomped away. “Wait! Karka—oof.” Ouch, okay, these new legs really weren’t working out too well. He might need to tweak this spell. There was the slight possibility that there were significant differences to be had between turning into your sister, and turning into a thirty-foot monster from another world.

There was also the slight possibility that John did not care at present; Karkat was getting away!

But when John looked up, Karkat was perfectly still. His eyebrows aimed an intense look in John’s direction that waffled between that thing Dave did when he practiced sword forms, and that other thing Jade did when faced with more than two kittens.

“Pyrope?” He called cautiously. “Stop squirming on the ground like a distressed paraplegic. Get up. Continue despising me, with actual trajectory.” He pointed too, like this would somehow make John’s legs start working. Pointed in the opposite direction of himself and the assistance he surely owed his troll girlfriend. John scowled at him.

“That’s really helpful, Karkat. I’m struck completely helpless in silent awe for how much that helped.”

Karkat’s lips peeled back to show a lot of teeth that looked chunky and adorable now that he was no longer several times larger than John. He brandished a sickle towards John’s face. “Let me make this abundantly clear,” he said. “If this is your backwards, mortifyingly stupidity-soaked idea of ‘ _tricking me_ ’,”—here Karkat provided perhaps the most aggressive finger quotes John had yet witnessed—“I will shove this sickle so far down your throat that you will have two windpipes to breathe out of. Is that satisfactorily transparent for you?”

John recoiled slightly, because those sickles were the same ones Karkat had used to take down his dinner and ew. Karkat stalked closer, hunched in on himself. When he was just out of range of John’s hands, he stopped again and knitted his eyebrows together. “This doesn’t count, okay?” He said.

“Huh?” John replied.

Karkat shuffled forward another step and crouched next to John to place a hand on his knee. “You were favoring this one, right?” He muttered, head too far down for John to see his face. All he could see was a lot of fluffy troll hair as Karkat leaned closer, and the tips of his nubby little horns. For all his talk of sickles and where he was going to be shoving them, Karkat’s hand had all the weight of a breath of air as he felt along John’s leg.

…Huh?

“Not broken,” Karkat muttered, and pulled his hand back after a final touch to John’s ankle. John watched his fingers in fascination. Okay, logically, he kind of got in the back of his mind that trolls would have to be able to treat their own wounds, but it was worth staring at. Trolls did stuff with their scary claws that didn’t involve killing things! Man.

So scary gray skin and needlepointed claws could be completely gentle, couldn’t they?

“Huh,” John said again, thoughtfully. He beamed at Karkat’s nubby horns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So for this chapter, I made no terrible jokes about the fourth wall. I am proud of me. I am the best muppet.  
> And with this update, so begins the next installment of copious friendleader interactions! They are disgustingly cute, and I make no apologies.


	11. JOHN: Invade Personal Space

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDAAAATES  
> I have very little idea if this is good. But I want to move the story along, so this is whatcha get.  
> Smelly human LIKE A BOSS.

Karkat looked up at John with barely-luminous eyes, so huge you could have fit the whole moon inside of one of them. “Can you stand?”

“It’s a possibility,” said John with the caution of a boy who has been dumped on his ass far too many times in the past few minutes. Karkat’s mouth twitched.

“Is this your socially-deprived way of asking me to carry you?” He said this with a very straight face. John found himself picturing it.

Swung up and surrounded with Karkat’s arms. His girl-troll head resting on Karkat’s manly chest, as Karkat stomped his way through a field of gently swaying troll-daisies. A shooting star spanned the sky overhead.

“I think I’d like to try standing,” John said hastily, inching his limbs into the proper position. This time John’s legs held. Karkat hovered for a moment before his eyes flickered down and he was trying to skulk free of John’s personal space.

Oh, right! Rightrightright. Karkat, personal space? Get with the program, Explorawizard Egbert!

John clapped his arms around Karkat, who instantly turned himself into a being composed entirely of elbows and thorns. They were warm elbows, though! John cackled, squeezing tighter because he was pretty sure he could out-stubborn Karkat’s elbows. The troll spluttered wordlessly into his shirt. He flailed one of his hands against John’s side. In retaliation, John squished his face into Karkat’s shoulder and sighed. Successful hug achieved! “Aw, don’t be grouchy, Karkat.”

“Gah,” Karkat wheezed. And then, with a little more fight, “ _grouchy_?” John thought for a moment that he felt Karkat purring—but, nope, he was just getting kicked off. Apparently Karkat was satisfied with John’s ability to stay upright at this point, because he did his best to bowl John back onto his butt.

“What the ever-crawling panFUCK was that supposed to be?!”

John, who had managed to keep his balance and couldn’t help smirking a little bit about it, offered, “A b…hug?” Damn. He couldn’t call it a brohug. Be the Terezi troll, John. You must perfect the Terezi troll, at least until you have securely confirmed Karkat’s not human-eating behavior.

Karkat tried to roll his eyes right out of his skull. “A bug. Yes. Yes, that makes ever so much sense, Pyrope, thank you for clenching it off my epidermal sack with your bony limbs, you complete waste of air.” John took a bow. He was feeling pretty giddy. Troll hugging. Shit was magical. “Did you somehow forget the conversation we had yesterday?”

“About?” John prompted. Karkat’s jaw dropped. He held out his hands towards John like he was imploring him.

“ _Hugging_.”

John tilted his head. “But you like hugs.” Ooh. And just look at _that_ , John had never seen anyone achieve that particular shade of carmine red right there! Was this strange sensation in John’s chest his heart turning to goop? Wow. Karkat dug his face into his palms and John was back to staring at how fluffy his hair was.

The noise that followed sulked so hard it hurt. “Okay. Do I _really_ need to be tortured further, or have you avenged yourself sufficiently?”

“No, we’re cool,” John assured him. Karkat and his troll girlfriend had probably had some kind of falling out while he was gone. Sheesh, John had to do everything around here himself—but he was cool with helping his buddy out! John dragged Karkat’s rigid frame forward, squishing him close enough that John now had troll hair in his eye (gah). He patted a hand against the dude’s back and gradually Karkat stopped pretending to be a statue and kind of smooshed against John, like a pie hurled into an unsuspecting victim’s face. Limbs dripping everywhere. Only instead of John’s face, it was his shoulder, and instead of a pie, it was Karkat, who tilted his head up enough to fix John with narrow eyes. He still appeared to be picking a fight. John grinned at him. Karkat’s mouth slowly closed. After a moment—and this time John definitely didn’t imagine it—he was purring.

Oh god, it was SO CUTE. There were not words for how cute this was. Troll purring could definitely give you Stockholm Syndrome. Troll purring could probably cure cancer. John bit back some kind of incoherent, oh my gosh, ububwah, _why are you so adorable_ noise and patted a hand against all that fluffy hair. Hugs were good. Hugs made the world go round.

“Ugh, you stink,” Karkat observed. He didn’t sound anywhere near as offended this time around, though. He also had his arms around John’s waist and they got a little tighter when John shifted, like he was preventing his victim’s escape.

Why so cute, why why why?

“You just now noticed that?” John asked. It had the unintended effect of making Karkat turn back into a living elbow.      

“I was distracted,” Karkat managed, sounding like he was being strangled by his own lungs. “By. My rage. At your existence.”

“Dude, you were right there, looking at my le—mphh.” Karkat’s hands could move pretty damn fast, apparently. John blinked down at him.

“Yes, and we’re not talking about that anymore,” Karkat said.

John licked his hand. Karkat headbutted his neck.

This was unfortunate for both of them, but on the upside, John now knew that 1) Karkat’s horns were hard and that 2) when Karkat was attached in a vampire kitten attackhug, rather than let go, he’d let John smoosh him. John rolled off of the troll and managed to disentangle himself from all the troll limbs. The wide-eyed look on Karkat’s face was so far from genuinely violent that growling when John caught him at it was completely pointless.

But before John could attempt another hug (third time was the charm!), Karkat abruptly sat up. “Shit, the patrol.”

John sat up with him. What exactly concerned him he couldn’t say, but the look on Karkat’s face had his heart beating in his throat and threatening to end this evening in vomit. It was kind of like before, when Karkat had looked like talking about serendipity was causing him a level of physical agony, but it was a lot less unguarded. “I smelled something unfamiliar on the perimeter,” Karkat told John. He waited, like this required an answer. When John had nothing to give him other than some solemn blinking, he added, “I wanted to make sure no one had found us.”

Found? Oh my god, had John not only taken up with trolls—but taken up with secret on the run refugee trolls?! Snuggly refugee trolls—okay, this exceeded his ability to process the sheer awesomeness taking place here. He bit back a smilebomb threatening to detonate and nodded a lot. Karkat’s ear swiveled in its socket (woo, nifty!) and then he was muttering something about not being able to smell anymore because of John’s horrible stench frying his vomeronasal passages amidst their own devastated screams.

“We shouldn’t let any threats start blasting discord in our territory unchecked,” Karkat cleared his throat. “That would be a really terrible decision.”

So why wasn’t Karkat moving? John scratched the back of his head, trying to gauge the look on Karkat’s face—slowly inching from unreadable to hostile. John thought he should suggest, “Maybe I should come along?”

“Of course not,” Karkat snorted. “I would never ask you to waste your time dealing with some bulge-muncher when it’s my job to mercilessly beat them into the dust. It’s my turn for patrol.” He said ‘ask’ kind of funny, the way Rose said ‘get out’ when she didn’t really mean it. “You probably have better things to do.” Karkat was chewing his lip slightly, watching John. “I mean, _way_ better things to do, Jegus, nothing in this valley has enough pan cells to rub together with sufficient friction to make a fire even if their shame globes were about to freeze off, yeah, wow, what am I even saying?”

John bit back a smile. “Actually Karkat, I’m pretty bored. I don’t mind.”

“This will be boring too!” Karkat exclaimed, with enough concern that John burst out laughing.

“Welp, you’ve changed my mind! I don’t wanna go anymore.” Even Karkat’s ears drooped. John begin to hold a straight face. “Oh geez,” he snickered, pushing off of the dirt. “Come on, come on. Where’s this horrible threatsmell coming from? Let’s neutralize the crap out of it.” For a minute Karkat’s scary troll teeth flashed in this horribly goofy grin and John had officially lost all control of his life.

Hugging the troll until death do them part was not an option, so John settled for shuffling along after him, watching Karkat patrol. His troll’s eyes had started glowing candlelight orange and pretty much the only word that came to mind was ‘prowling.’ From below, as an entity slightly smaller than one of Karkat’s toes, there hadn’t been anything graceful to all the stomping Karkat had done. Now John was aware of lots of little things, like the way Karkat slouched forward, tensed to spring, and the way his footsteps seemed noiseless in comparison to John’s (and the way Karkat kept sneaking glances back at his troll girlfriend like he was trying to impress her. As proxy girlfriend, John could certify this as both completely endearing and way dorky).

The Alternian landscape, in between bouts of observing Karkat provide a physical embodiment of anxiety, changed a little as they walked. John was getting snagged by a lot of thorny grasses and the occasional bulbous purple flower (which he might want to consider bringing Jade as an I Want to Live offering). There were no cliffs while John was this tall—just a lot of rolling, rocky terrain consumed by a gray mist in the distance. It was hard to see very far in the dark, so John couldn’t tell how far the line of sight stretched. He got the distinct impression from Karkat’s glowy eyes that the troll was seeing farther than he could.

Karkat straightened up after they’d prowled a ways (well Karkat was prowling; John was basically tip-toeing, which didn’t have the same badass oomph), sniffing the air and then giving John a peevish look. “Are you standing downwind?”

There was no wind. John raised his eyebrows.

“Fuck,” Karkat declared, and shoved the sickles back into a belt at his waist. “I can smell exactly nothing. You smell like the thousand year old bacterial residue scraped off a bibblebo’s ass. What in the hell were you doing before you decided to aggravate me?”

John decided to opt for honesty. “Climbing things.” Hours of climbing things. Also, a brief bout of falling, but that wasn’t important.

“Climbing what?” Karkat faced him. “Terezi, there’s nothing to climb. Well, except for the hive, but—“ He made a face. “Oh my gog, you were climbing up the side of the hive, weren’t you? Like an oversized grub. I am embarrassed just to know you.” He froze right after saying that, shooting John a guilty look. _Oh yeah_ , that look said. _We’re not supposed to be fighting. Fuck._

“You’d be surprised how high up it goes,” John said, straight-faced. “I was climbing for a long time. I even broke cloud cover.” Twice.

“There is something so, so wrong with you,” Karkat decided. And then snapped his mouth shut and cracked the heel of his palm into his eyes. Poor guy really couldn’t seem to help himself.


	12. JOHN: Achieve Zenlike Mastery of Calm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at these DORKS.
> 
> Also, warning: below there is some teenage dude talk, which I dunno, might be offensive to some. Given that you're reading a story in which Karkat exists, I'm going to assume we're all mature enough not to cry about this, but I feel like fair warnings should be given anyway, in case not.
> 
> Also, it is again too long because I am just too lazy to edit things down this weekend. TAKE MY SHITTY WRITING AND SUFFER.
> 
> Last update for this weekend! I now crawl back under my rock to be disgruntled about things.

The morose expression on Karkat’s face suggested he was thinking about biting his own tongue off. Couldn’t have that!  
  
John snorted and grabbed Karkat by the wrist, tugging them both down into the grass. The troll flailed spectacularly and immediately started shoving John off, but John was wily and they both ended up flopped in a bed of thorns.  
  
“Ah,” John sighed happily, spreading his arms out in brazen defiance of all the thorns that were stabbing through his flesh. “This is nice.”

“This is painful,” Karkat corrected him, and pulled something prickly out of John’s earlobe. “Do you want to get out of the bloodgrass like a sane troll, or do you want to continue to behave as though the entire content of your cartilage nub has been replaced with particularly degenerate slurry?”

“ _Ah_ ,” John repeated, with a little more emphasis. Karkat grumbled, and grabbed his arm, plucking out thorns. John watched for a minute, fascinated at how useful those claws were. Well, yeah, he got that they’d be good for, like, cutting open a stubborn parcel. Carving your name into someone else’s desk. But they were also good for pulling out thorns and Karkat could turn his fingertips out to swipe at any blood so that the claws never touched John’s skin.

There was so much about trolls that John didn’t know. Observing Karkat made that truth feel like a bad thing.

It wasn’t like studying, though! Studying sucked a big one. This was the way John wanted to experience everything. Up close and personal, learning by doing, and right on cue the wind blew into his face and he swallowed a mouthful of dirt. Oh, _gross_. As he coughed, Karkat broke into this little hiccup of giggles that made John beam at him and reach over with dirty fingers. As Karkat snapped a scowl back in place, John squeezed his cheeks and tugged them upwards into the most horrific approximation of a smile he’d ever seen, with Karkat’s eyes huge over it like he was expecting John to try to steal his teeth.

“Made you goof,” John declared proudly, and Karkat rattled a growl before blundering a hand over and mashing on John’s cheeks, making a face that definitely wasn’t a smile. Karkat cackled out some completely unwholesome laugh. John snickered back and Karkat froze and tilted his head, ears swiveling and John almost stopped before he realized that Karkat was listening to _him_.

And then he totally did stop, because maybe his laugh was different enough from Terezi’s that the thinksee spell wouldn’t work anymore—but when he stopped all he could hear was Karkat purring. The troll let go of his nose to push his head against John’s shoulder and vibrate all warm and tickly. John observed that Karkat’s knee kept bumping into his, and it was probably on purpose. His heart got ten degrees warmer. “I like your laugh,” Karkat said quietly. Oh. Okay.

Stop that, heart, right this instant! No fluttering! Fluttering is officially homo territory, Do Not Cross, get your shit back in line.

“It sounds like a hundred chainsaws desperately committing suicide, but it’s really nice when you do it.” Karkat added. John’s heart flutter calmed itself. Karkat appeared to be reflecting on his addendum to the otherwise romantistupid declaration and came up with, “Don’t take that the wrong way.”

John snorted. “Boy. For someone who says so much, you’re really not good at getting your point across, huh?” Karkat lifted his head to look up at John, surprisingly red-cheeked, so John tried to make his tone a little lighter. “You can just say what you mean, you know?”

“Hm,” Karkat said, kind of ducking behind his hair. John watched him lean over and start taking his aggression out on the grasses. Possibly for having thorns, possibly for just existing to witness him getting flustered. Karkat’s face was a mask of emotionless determination, except for the fact that his ears were still blushed red. John giggled under his breath and bumped his knee idly against Karkat’s. The troll made a sound like a lock turning, only from way deeper than his throat, and shot John a look that somehow ended with their knees mashed together and John staring up at the stars. He’d been so desperate to come up here and do pretty much a million things with Karkat, but now he was glad that he’d dropped his bag.

It was weird to be feeling all kinds of friendly with someone not even talking to you-you. Probably. But John felt super relaxed, the way he could get when he was alone, but with none of the pressure to start thinking and thinking and thinking himself into circles and seriousness and bad ideas like that time he’d thought the best way to jump-start his wind powers would be to jump off the roof. Karkat’s breathing and grumbles filled that space, and he was really close and warm and it was just. Nice.

John didn’t know how to put it into words. He’d never felt anything like it before, so maybe it was just a troll thing. Happyquiet. Friendpeace.

Or maybe just… calm.

It could do with a few less thorns, mind you, but he let his eyes close and just breathed. John felt like a part of Alternia, for a moment—strongly enough that he thought of Jade and her effortless connection with the earth of Prospit—he felt like a thumbprint on the rocks and like he’d been molded into the perfect shape. His breath seemed to spread around him like a cocoon, and recycled through his lungs like something more than just air. His fingertips prickled. His magic wanted _out_.

He blinked his eyes back open at a soft touch against his head. Karkat was leaned over him, a hand cupped to the back of John’s head, lifting it enough for him to… mess with his horns? No, not quite. What was he doing?

“What’s that?” John grunted, raising a hand to investigate. Karkat slapped it back down with a growl and rearranged a few strands of John’s hair before he sat back on his heels. He growled a little when John lifted his hand, but didn’t actually shove at him again (well, aside from his knee, which was thunking against John’s like clockwork). John’s fingers encountered something… leafy. Puzzled, he felt along it (got a thorn in his knuckle for his troubles) and then groaned. “Oh my god. It’s a flower crown.”

“Shut up,” Karkat grumbled, expression snapping a few degrees more hostile. “It looks good.”

 _It looks gay,_ is what John wanted to come back with, but he wasn’t able to go with that one for various reasons. Instead he dropped his hand and shot Karkat a pitiful look. Karkat quickly outdid him and John was forced to concede that yes, this was cute. In the painfully awkward kind of way. Karkat couldn’t talk to his troll girlfriend without insulting her, but he could make her flower crowns and bop her on the knee. He either needed an intervention or a religious following, neither of which John could manage, but he did know one thing.

If he was going to be wearing a girly flower crown (hung around his horns, he realized with a sinking feeling, why was that so precious?), then Karkat was definitely wearing one too. “Okay, your turn,” John announced, which made Karkat sit up straighter and actually look kind of excited. John flailed his way upright—Karkat immediately tagged after him, fussing about the floral arrangement. John let him do it, kind of enjoying Karkat’s hands—so warm and gentle. He wanted another hug, but that could wait. For now, he was busy selecting the girliest, frilliest flowers he could think of. As a bro, it was the only logical course of action.

He discovered not too long afterwards that he was shitty at making flower crowns. Also, Karkat, who was apparently the master of weaving plant matter into circles, was only willing to watch as John made his attempt, no matter how many times John stabbed himself with thorny bits. John kept looking up with intent to demand Karkat use his spooky troll powers to assist, but the words never quite came out. Karkat’s face was a functional weapon, clearly. This accounted for why John was spending his afternoon making flower crowns on Alternia.

The end result was the most bedraggled thing he’d ever laid eyes on—maybe one flower had managed not to fall off of the collection of broken stems and awkwardly fraying grasses that John had managed to squeeze into something capable of clinging to its shape for, at best, five minutes. Karkat was looking at it. John looked at it as well, with a great deal of regret. But it would have to be going on Karkat’s head, even if by splendid prank, because there had to be something redeeming about this experience.

When John looked back at him, Karkat had his head tilted forward. He was glaring slightly, and appeared to be about to headbutt John again—“Well?” The troll demanded, tone nowhere near as snappish as his expression. He kicked John’s foot. It was the most affectionate kick John had ever experienced. “Would you just put it on me, before we both die of exposure?”

John was grinning stupidly wide. “Yeah, sure,” he agreed and leaned forward. He had to be pretty careful with his flower crown (it was looking for any excuse to disintegrate entirely into preemptively murdered plant matter), but he managed to get it around Karkat’s nubby little horns. When he leaned back, Karkat looked like a complete idiot. He had a lopsided wad of grass stuck to his head, both eyes lit like candles, and his smile was smug enough that John felt manipulated.

“Well, this evening has been significantly less soul-churningly horrible than I’d imagined,” Karkat muttered around his smile. “I mean, I recognize that saying this will jinx the whole affair and something disgustingly hideous will have to come devour us both purely because I am predestined to eternal suffering, but let me just say as your moirail that you make things suck with the force of a scyllan nook vastly less than I do.” He then, while John was still processing that, spread his hands out to say, “Okay, come on now, make with the lightning strikes and sudden virulent pestilence.”

“Nah, I’ve got a better idea,” John said, and wrapped his arms around Karkat’s middle. Geez, Karkat felt so skinny! His ribs stuck out more than Rose’s. He was purring pretty much immediately, so John figured that all along, he’d plotted for John to hug him in his deviously adorkable way.

Well, John could not simply allow that to pass. So he snuggled the hell out of Karkat for all of two seconds, and then threw himself to the left, cinching his arms tight to prevent Karkat from escaping.

Karkat pretty much bellowed the whole time, and John had enough sense to question whether or not you really wanted to go rolling down hills that were made of A) thorns and B) pointy rocks, but you know who those kind of concerns were for? Not explorawizards!

And thus they tumbled as a collection of limbs and eyes desperately sealed to the vindictive prodding of an unsuitable hill. Karkat was shrieking (muffled periodically by spluttering on whatever rocks he’d just inhaled) John couldn’t stop laughing, no matter how much unidentified plant nastiness was getting into his mouth. His prankster’s gambit had picked a good patch of hill to roll, down, too, because when he skidded to a halt and sat up to the world spinning, very little hurt.

Everything was great and awesome and perfect and his heart was gunning in the most amazing way.

Karkat sprang upright a little more gracefully than John’s wobbling ascent (oh cool, John’s flower crown was actually clinging to life; he could see that one surviving flower sticking up behind Karkat’s ear). Karkat was covered head to toe in a layer of damp earth and looked like he wanted to keep screaming but was too embarrassed to do that while not actually rolling down a mountain. He said, “Agh,” and spat something leafy onto John’s pants.

“That was fun,” John decided. Karkat gave him a look of utter disbelief. John bounced in place. “Wanna go again?”

Karkat didn’t quite manage to muster a reply. He drew a sickle and shook it at John a little (John observed this with due concern; as fun as hill rolling was, he wasn’t looking to get made into sliced ham for it) and then dropped the sickle and just slumped. John was stricken.

Had he just discovered the one person alive who _didn’t_ like hill rolling? Good grief. Karkat was not explorawizard material. And John was kind of concerned that he was hurt now, which made his guts scrunch.

He ventured nearer to Karkat. “Hey, you didn’t actually—eh?” Karkat had a handful of his shirt and hauled John close before he could blink. He was honestly expecting to get socked by his fun-hating friend, but all Karkat did was cling to the handful of his shirt and shake it out a few times like he was trying to get the dirt off.

“Uh,” John thought it best to pat Karkat’s shoulder. “You okay? Sorry. I thought, since you wanted to do the flower thing, I could show you something way more fun and, um.” Karkat definitely wasn’t purring anymore. “How mad are you, on a scale of one to ten?”

Karkat glowered up through his eyelashes. He had long ones. Trolls probably weren’t supposed to have eyelashes; this was all very confusing. John’s stomach suddenly went seasick (with fear, obviously).

John had enough time to see the troll’s eyes looming close to think, _Oh, okay, so biting my face off is a respectable means of protesting hill rolling in troll-world_. Instead of biting, something very soft happened to his nose. Cotton balls having love affairs with rose petals and dandelions. That kind of soft.

As John’s eyes opened, Karkat pecked another kiss against his nose and then he slouched back down and ducked his face between his knees. John noticed his lips were an impossible color. Cause black things didn’t look so soft, and gray things didn’t feel warm.

“You are insane,” Karkat told him.


	13. JOHN--> Question Subjects of Importance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this chapter sucks a lot more than I remembered, but I wanted to post something else before I slink off for exams, so just take it and suffer.
> 
> I am sorry for the lack of smooches in this chapter. This will eventually be made up for, I promise.

The last thing John had expected today was such a very tingly nose—or his heterosexuality questioning the tingliness of this nose. His stomach hadn’t stopped doing the loopy thing from when he stopped thinking Karkat was about to kill him either. As he stared, Karkat’s ears were drooping. They looked like they would fit into John’s hands and then maybe wriggle free. Unless John grabbed them kind of hard.  
  
…Wait, what was he thinking about, and why did it suddenly involve his mouth?   
  
The troll heaved a sigh. “Pale for you,” Karkat said, and was drawing another square on the back of John’s hand—wait, no—a diamond? Yes. Diamond. Focus on that (stop thinking about his ears!). He traced with his clawtip, and just a little more pressure would make this a very unpleasant etching, but Karkat didn’t do anything that hurt. His hand fell away and he ducked his head.  
  
“Oh,” John said. He flexed his fingers, and it did nothing to stop the little sparks crawling around on the back of his hand. The way he saw it, he had three options, and since the first two involved Karkat’s ears, they didn’t count. Instead John tugged the troll’s gray hand into reach. He grinned when Karkat looked at him.   
  
“Terezi. What are you doing?”  
  
“Palewifery,” John informed him. He ran a finger over the back of Karkat’s knuckles, drawing a lopsided set of angles. But holy shit, Karkat’s _whole face_ lit up. He blinked his eyes incredibly wide and looked back and forth between his own hand and John’s face, mouth hanging open.   
  
“Like that, right?” John demanded, disproportionately pleased to see the troll gone all slack-jawed. His ears were flicking, and his cheeks were a little red. John’s heartbeat started to pick up. He was rolling down a hill again.   
  
Karkat exhaled shakily and said, “Yeah, you fucking moron, like that.” Testing out another disarmingly cute shade of red, are we, Karkat? He snapped his hand out of John’s grip and grabbed him by the wrist, hauling him up.   
  
“Um, where are we going?” John asked, stumbling—nope, he was just putting the sickle back into his belt, false alarm.   
  
“Up the damn hill so you can try to drub us to death with our own forward momentum, you sick excuse for a sentient consciousness,” Karkat retorted. The purr rolling out of him was a steady thrum that John could feel through his wrist when he focused. It was also—   
  
Well. Only a little. Objectively and stuff. From Terezi’s point of view.   
  
(It was hot as fuck.)  
  
“Because you’re a moron,” Karkat muttered through the sexy purring. “And apparently that’s contagious. Whoop-de-fucking-doo, my common sense is slain. Fuck you very much.” His purrs thickened out when he said ‘fuck you’. John squeaked. With surprise. Totally platonic surprise about why that was kind of making him, er, feel some pretty strange things! About his very male troll friend.  
  
_Male_. **Troll**. FRIEND.   
  
You know, there was a lot of information John could be taking from this conversation, but he figured the most important element was: the fact that they were about to go down the hill again.   
  
So he beamed, threw an arm around Karkat’s neck and hugged him all the way up, even though it was completely uncomfortable and awkward. Karkat’s hair was fluffy and the purring went through John’s collarbone. Wisely, he decided to chock this up to the fact that he was in a girl body. Not his fault that his girl body found Karkat’s purr sexy! Right.   
  
This time when they reached the bottom Karkat sat up looking wild-eyed. “This is not fun,” he snapped, brandishing a finger at John before he could open his mouth. “Don’t even think that I’m enjoying this. Hurry up.” He practically sprinted back up the hill and John chased after him, giggling until he wheezed.   
  
Scratch that, this was the best thing ever, with full certainty. Karkat wasn’t even pretending not to enjoy it anymore. John had taught him the true meaning of _Christmas_. He went right ahead and kept teaching him until they were both sore and scuffed up and John couldn’t seem to catch his breath. Karkat ruffled a hand through John’s hair while he panted and John managed to grin up at him. He was on a roll about the smiling thing. How many smiles could he sneak out of this troll before Karkat noticed what he was doing? How warm and squishy could John’s feelings get?   
  
“Come on,” Karkat grumbled, and hauled John up by the arm—tugged him towards the hill, but instead of trying to climb it, Karkat just tossed them both down at the base, with their legs tangled up and Karkat’s head rapidly colonizing John’s shoulder. John grinned at the stars overhead and had not a single regret. “State your feelings,” Karkat said, with all the formality of a secret cultist initiation.   
  
John considered his feelings, and stated, “Worn out, but overwhelmingly contented.”   
  
“I cannot believe I exhausted my energy reserves to act as the polishing service for a bunch of chlorophyll materials.” Karkat’s hand slid through John’s hair again. John hummed. Trolls got the best happy noises. He wished he could purr. Karkat’s fingers were warm. “Altercations with you are about as unpleasant as stabbing myself repeatedly in the soft tissue,” Karkat informed John off-handedly.  
  
Ooh, so Karkat HAD fought with his troll girlfriend. John tilted his head over to give Karkat a stern look. “Then explain yourself, young—“ crap, Karkat wasn’t human, “—er, troll.”  
  
“Well, I am the optimal example of horrible judgment’s boulder-shitting capacity for generating stupid fucking answers,” Karkat offered. John snorted a helpless laugh at the statement. Oh man. Karkat needed to keep talking, possibly forever. “As I’m sure you can dredge from the soiled recesses of your memory.” He fidgeted a little bit.   
  
“How disgusted would you be if I asked you what I fucked up last time?” Karkat burst out. “I mean—I’m not trying to push you into anything you’re not ready for, Jegus, so if this is moving too fast, feel free to call off any semblance of a feelings jam with a swift punch to the bulge and we’ll never bring it up again.” His voice shook. John frowned in concern. Holy shit, was Karkat thinking that emotional discussions were moving too _fast_?   
  
…Had he ever actually met a girl? No, but Terezi was definitely a girl.   
  
Maybe trolls were too tall to talk about emotions. No wonder Karkat was so terrible at talking to Terezi!   
  
“No, dude,” John assured Karkat, and tried to send the right girlfriend signals out by laying his head on top of Karkat’s. “We can totally have feelings together. This shows that you are a sensitive and caring individual.” He’d borrowed that from this lecture his dad gave him. Dad was very clear that you were always to treat ladies with utmost courtesy and respect, even if they did rub lavender in your hair and break your favorite wand.   
  
Karkat snorted and tugged at John’s hair before looping his fingers gently back through. Oh, petting? Well alright. John sighed happily, and realized that Karkat was probably still waiting for an answer about what he’d done to get Terezi mad at him.   
  
John consulted his inner Terezi, but she wasn’t feeling particularly forthcoming today—she seemed more intent on snapping her teeth and reminding John that he’d promised the scarier troll a favor—so he was just going to have to go with something generic. The last fight he’d had would probably have to be coming home from the beanstalk and being tackleglomped by his friends. And that wasn’t _John’s_ fault (nope), but it wasn’t their fault either.   
  
Basically, the only reason John wanted to strangle Dave, Jade, and Rose so badly sometimes was because they were such good friends. So that’s what he told Karkat. “It’s not necessarily that anybody did anything. Sometimes you just fight because you’re close.” He grinned at Karkat’s nose. It was kind of hooked. It was a very trollish nose. “The best part about being friends is that you can make up again afterwards and it’s like, no sweat, no big deal. We are _so_ chill.”   
  
Karkat’s answer was pretty much a peep. Was there no _end_ to the strange, squeaky noises this troll could produce? “Uh,” he murmured. “So we, uh, are making up? I guess?” He ran fingers through John’s hair, however, like they belonged just there. John fondly questioned Karkat’s ability to read signals. “In that case, what are the odds of you discussing what is pissing you off, not just cackling at my spectacular inability to perform telepathy on command?”   
  
Step one was probably making more of an effort not to irritably insult his troll girlfriend, the surroundings, the grass, and himself at every given opportunity. John could see how that would be annoying.   
  
Except in practice, pfft, it _really_ wasn’t. The thought of Karkat cutting himself off and speaking in short, normal sentences, without the growling and the purring? He’d just be _saying_ stuff instead of enacting it like the world was his stage. That was really tragic and as long as John was pretending to be Terezi… no. Karkat’s ability to grouchily emote was John’s now, and he was keeping it.   
  
Step two was to try and be the Terezi troll, except John really wasn’t good at being the Terezi troll. What was pissing her off? Humans, probably. There might be some residual feelings about broom closets lingering in there, and maybe she didn’t like the fact that she was blind (because that bothered Dave a lot, even when he didn’t say. It was like, you could have been talking and having fun for hours and he was the most normal person ever, and then somehow it would come up and Dave started getting mad about the carpeting or something).   
  
Step three was probably not getting completely swept away in how nice Karkat’s claws felt sliding through his hair and ending up babbling in spite of himself, “I’m kind of having trouble with magic.”   
  
Aw man. John was not good at step three.  
  
“Really?” Karkat said, and rewarded John with a firmer set of scritches around the horns. John hummed, completely happy. “Didn’t know you were into magic. Well, what kind of thing are you beating your cartilage nub against? Maybe I can help ease the pain.”   
  
John cracked an eye to give Karkat a doubtful look. “You can use magic?” Karkat had yet to question even one of John’s spells. John’s pranking magic was awesome, but he usually had to push if he wanted it to work on someone with talent of their own. Karkat hadn’t so much as blinked.   
  
The troll gave him a sour look. “Don’t be a shithead. Of course I can use magic. Do you want my help or not?”   
  
Well. John blinked at the troll, who was still rubbing against the top of his head. On one hand, this was rapidly edging into things he shouldn’t talk about while pretending to be someone else.   
  
On the other hand, was it even possible to recognize how INSANELY COOL it would be if John learned how trolls worked magic? Not even his dad knew anything about it. His heart hammered.  
  
“…Maybe just a little bit?” Crap, his voice was squeaking. John cleared his throat to add, “I don’t really feel like practicing. Could you just give me some tips?”  
  
Karkat’s thumb ran between John’s eyebrows. And okay, John didn’t think of himself as anyone remotely near touch-starved. Sure, he loved hugs and flailing around with his friends, but this was on a whole other level. Karkat’s hands made him feel like he was about to fall through a crack in the earth. His face was heating up a little as Karkat purred at him, stroking fingers back along Terezi’s horns.   
  
“Well? What kind of trouble are you having, Pyrope?”


End file.
